Federal prosecutors in California said Thursday they had indicted attorney Michael Avenatti on 36 counts of stealing millions of dollars from clients, tax evasion, bank fraud, and lying during bankruptcy proceedings. Avenatti, 48, was arrested last month in New York on unrelated allegations he tried to shake down Nike for up to $25 million.

Authorities in Louisiana have arrested a man suspected of burning down three rural African American churches in the state. Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old white man, faces three state charges of simple arson of a religious building. Federal investigators are looking into whether race motived the crimes. The first fire burned St. Mary Baptist Church in Port Barre, La., last month. Days later, the Greater Union Baptist Church and Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Opelousas, La., were set ablaze. Each was more than 100 years old.

A man who falsely claimed to be an Illinois boy who disappeared six years ago was arrested in Cincinnati on Thursday. Brian Rini, 23, claimed to be Timmothy Pitzen, who went missing in 2011 at the age of 6. Rini has falsely portrayed himself as a juvenile sex trafficking victim twice before, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court on Friday. The FBI declared Rini’s story a hoax on Thursday based on DNA testing a day after he told authorities in Newport, Ky., that he was Pitzen. The affidavit said there is enough evidence to charge Rini with lying to federal authorities.

The Justice Department issued a scathing report Wednesday on Alabama prisons, giving the state 49 days to correct the “severe” constitutional violations of prisoners’ rights or face a federal lawsuit. The report said inmates endure an “extraordinarily high rate of violence at the hands of other prisoners,” with the number of inmate-on-inmate attacks spiking dramatically in the last 5½ years. Investigators described a culture of violence in which inmates brutally attack each other with knives and other weapons and rapes occur throughout the prisons.

One of the 33 parents charged in the college admissions bribery scandal agreed to plead guilty Wednesday. Peter Jan Sartorio, a packaged-food entrepreneur from California, disclosed the deal as Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin appeared in federal court in Boston, along with some of the other defendants. Prosecutors accuse Sartorio, 53, of paying $15,000 in cash to have someone correct his daughter’s answers on the ACT college entrance exam. The exact charges to which he planned to plead were not immediately clear.

Popular crowdfunding platform GoFundMe finds its name in many heartwarming news stories and viral videos. This year, for example, it collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for the family of an 8-year-old Christian refugee who, two years after fleeing violence from Boko Haram in Nigeria, unexpectedly won the New York state chess tournament for his age group in March.

A man convicted on state murder charges in a deadly car attack at a white nationalist rally in Virginia in 2017 pleaded guilty Wednesday to federal hate crime charges. A Virginia jury previously found James Alex Fields Jr. of Maumee, Ohio, guilty of intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of people at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, 2017, injuring more than 30 people and killing anti-racism activist Heather Heyer. He pleaded guilty Wednesday to 29 of 30 federal charges, excluding one count that carried a potential death penalty.