In the news
April Battle of Mobile, Ala., said a home security system took video of a woman taking her poker-playing inflatable Santa display from their front yard and stuffing it into the trunk of a car just after she stole two Christmas trees and other decorations from the house next door.
Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former President Bill Clinton and Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, announced on Twitter that she’s expecting a second child next summer.
William Kalaher was new to his job as a 911 dispatcher and had been taking solo calls for only two weeks when he coached a couple by phone on how to deliver their baby girl when the mom gave birth on the side of Interstate 15 near Salt Lake City, when the pair couldn’t make it to a hospital in time.
Allen Adkins, a lieutenant with the Salvation Army in Morgantown, W. Va., said someone slipped a $1,000 bill into a Salvation Army kettle, extending a mystery donation tradition that’s continued every year for nearly four decades.
Chad Fisher, 30, of Cypress, Texas, has been charged with criminal trespass and impersonating a public servant, police said, after pretending to be a government inspector to get free cigarettes from a convenience store and then going outside to light them up.
Toni Herrera-Bast, spokesman for Alabama’s Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, said passengers carrying unwrapped gifts through the security screening checkpoint will be able to get their gifts wrapped at no charge as they wait for their flight.
Christopher Petronino, 50, used a rock hammer to fight off a bear that grabbed his foot and tried to drag him into its den as he and three Boy Scouts stopped to look at a cave while hiking at Split Rock Reservoir in northern New Jersey.
O’Neil Curtis, a barber in Baton Rouge, gave free haircuts to children if they agreed to sit in his chair and read to him from a grade-appropriate book chosen from an assortment of titles taken to the shop by Lucy Perera, a school and community program coordinator for the LSU Museum of Art.
Darth Vader is a tattooed 43-year-old former Marine who owns a gym and is raising funds online for a bone marrow transplant after the former Eric Welch of Canandaigua, N.Y., legally changed his name to that of the Sith Lord villain of the Star Wars films.