In the news
Tiffany Brendt, a selectman in Parsonsfield, Maine, said residents grabbed their shovels and used their own plows to clear the roads when the small town’s only snowplow driver quit after a Dec. 30 storm dumped 25 inches of snow on the area.
David Lund, a police sergeant in Appleton, Wis., said Steven Johnson, 53, got his driver’s license reinstated in July, which meant he had a valid driver’s license when he was charged on New Year’s Day with his 11th drunken- driving offense since 1990.
Queen Sylvia, 73, of Sweden says in a new public television documentary that Drottningholm Palace, built in the late 16th century, is haunted by many ghosts, but adds that the phantoms at the royals’ private residence are “pretty friendly.”
Florentino Herrera, 48, was recorded by a squad car camera trying to destroy cocaine hidden under his belly fat while he was being taken to jail, accused of running a stop sign and failing a field sobriety test early on New Year’s Eve, police in Austin, Texas, said.
Miguel McCarty, 25, of New Orleans faces vehicular homicide and other charges after police said he waited hours to report crashing a minivan into Lake Pontchartrain with his landlord inside, resulting in her death, Jefferson Parish detectives reported.
Steve Bloom, the owner of a used- book store in Hawes, England, who asks for a 50- pence ( 62- cent) browsing fee to see if customers are serious about buying books, drew the ire of a city councilman who branded Bloom “the bookseller from hell” who is hurting Hawes’ “friendly” reputation.
Stephen Goodlett, 36, who was fired from his job as a high school principal in Elizabethtown, Ky., after accusations that he seized student phones to search for nude pictures that he later traded online, has been indicted on federal charges of possessing and transporting child pornography.
Clint Ashmead was skiing at a resort south of Salt Lake City when he captured video of a boy who was dangling from a ski lift by his backpack and was later rescued when operators used a ladder to reach him and pull him back onto the lift.