Human Race

Dropped

After a four-year battle for religious liberty, Liberty Ridge Farm owners Robert and Cynthia Gifford decided on Feb. 23 to end their appeal. The New York couple had fought in vain for the freedom to host weddings exclusively for male-female couples at their farm. The state’s Division of Human Rights ordered the Giffords to pay $13,000 in fines and damages for declining to host a same-sex wedding in 2012, and in January a state appellate court upheld the judgment.

Died

Harper Lee, the best-selling author of To Kill a Mockingbird, died Feb. 19 at the age of 89. The Alabama native’s small-town story of racial injustice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and remains standard reading for millions of American schoolchildren. Surprised by her book’s success, Lee withdrew from media attention and avoided publicity for nearly 50 years. She published no more books until last year, when HarperCollins released Go Set a Watchman, written before Mockingbird but set 20 years later.

Cleared

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals tossed out felony abuse-of-power charges against former governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry on Feb. 24. An Austin grand jury had indicted Perry in 2014, accusing him of using state funding to threaten a political rival. The rival was Rosemary Lehmberg, a Democratic district attorney who headed an anti-corruption unit Republicans accused of partisanship. When Lehmberg was convicted of drunk driving, Perry vetoed funding for the unit and called for Lehmberg’s resignation. In dismissing the case, the appeals court ruled 6-2 that courts can’t undermine a governor’s veto powers.

Sued

Four former members of Mars Hill Church in Seattle filed a federal racketeering lawsuit on Feb. 29 against two of the church’s former leaders—Pastor Mark Driscoll and elder Sutton Turner. The lawsuit alleges Driscoll and Turner violated the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) by spending designated contributions on activities for which they were not intended. The plaintiffs accuse the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability of turning a blind eye to the church’s attempts to keep its spending practices secret. The RICO law, passed in 1970, exists to prosecute the heads of organized crime groups who order their subordinates to break the law. The couples who filed the lawsuit say together they donated $92,700 to Mars Hill over six years, and their money was misspent.

Rescued

Kurdish special forces evacuated Swedish teenager Marilyn Nevalainen from ISIS territory in a mid-February raid. Nevalainen, now 16 years old, told Kurdish media her boyfriend misled her into traveling to Syria and Iraq last summer: “I didn’t know what ISIS means, what Islam is—nothing.” She was pregnant when she traveled to Islamic State territory and gave birth after arriving there. The infant’s present location is unclear. Nevalainen’s boyfriend, 19, is believed to have died in a Russian airstrike.

Fired

The University of Missouri fired assistant professor Melissa Click on Feb. 26 after a new video surfaced showing her in an altercation with police. The October video showed Click, 45, telling police officers to “back up” from student protesters at a homecoming parade and cursing an officer who grabbed her shoulder. The university’s governing Board of Curators fired the communications professor as more than 100 state lawmakers demanded her dismissal. School officials had suspended Click in January after she received a misdemeanor assault charge stemming from her attempts to intimidate student journalists reporting on campus race protests last November.

Denied

Singer Kesha lost her bid Feb. 19 to be released from a recording contract with a male producer she says sexually assaulted and psychologically manipulated her. The pop star had sought a preliminary injunction at the New York Supreme Court to record without the involvement of her longtime producer, known as Dr. Luke. Kesha filed a civil lawsuit alleging the abuse in 2014, and now suits and countersuits rage in three states. Dr. Luke accuses Kesha of defaming him and trying to extort a contract renegotiation for more money.

Died

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the sixth secretary-general of the United Nations, died Feb. 16 at the age of 93. The Egyptian Copt and professor-turned-diplomat came to power at the UN amid post–Cold War optimism in 1992. But during his five-year term, Boutros-Ghali clashed with the Bill Clinton administration over its role (or lack of involvement) in humanitarian and military missions and over U.S. debt owed to the UN. Boutros-Ghali’s tenure coincided with massacres in Bosnia and in Rwanda, where perhaps 1 million died in a 100-day span in 1994. The United States vetoed his bid for a second term.

Died

Ramón Castro, the elder brother of Cuban revolutionaries Fidel and Raúl, died Feb. 23 at the age of 91. Ramón Castro led a simple life as a rancher in the eastern village of Birán. He worked on the family farm while his powerful brothers launched a revolution against Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s. Though often an agricultural consultant to the Communist regime, Ramón rarely wielded government power.

By the Numbers

1 in 7 | The ratio of American women past age 65 who are in the workforce. Demographers expect the proportion to grow to 1 in 5 by 2024.

50% | The risk gay and bisexual black men in America face for contracting HIV. Overall for Americans, the risk of acquiring HIV is 1.05 percent.

$880.6 billion | The amount of money the U.S. government counted as assets from the Federal Direct Loan Program for students in 2015, according to the Department of the Treasury. The figure made up 27 percent of government assets.