In the news
Dana Sinno of St. Johns, Fla., said her 8-year-old son, Luca, sporting blue hair, a suit and tie, wanted a bold look for school picture day but didn’t get his picture made and instead was sent home because of school rules that ban “extreme hairstyles.”
Frank McKenzie, a fire captain in Huntsville, Ala., said fire crews, their equipment and personal items had to be temporarily moved to another station so the building could be fumigated after two firefighters were bitten by poisonous brown recluse spiders.
Jan Smith, 78, forgot to latch the front door of her home near Sumpter, Ore., and woke to find in her living room a 160-pound, 3-year-old male bear that then fled the house and was later killed when wildlife officers determined that it had been wounded a month earlier in another home encounter.
Barry Clapperton, 40, of Pittsburgh faces charges that include public drunkenness and threatening to use weapons of mass destruction after police said he called in a bomb threat to a restaurant in a bid to get out of paying for his meal.
Sauli Niinisto, 69, the president of Finland, and his wife, Jenni Haukio, 40, are expecting a child in February, the couple’s first since their marriage in 2009, saying in a statement that they had hoped for a child but “have encountered many obstacles during these years.”
Kent Burgess, a Missouri nature photographer, said he witnessed a charging bull elk use its antlers to gore a woman in the arm, which was the second goring in two weeks involving people who have been warned not to approach the animals at Lone Elk Park in western St. Louis County.
Andrea Smith, 31, of Cleveland, who pleaded guilty to menacing and other counts for pulling a gun on a barber because he was taking too long to cut her 7-year-old’s hair, was sentenced to six months in jail.
Marsha Rodgers, owner of a pet cemetery in Richmond, Va., in use since the 1930s and now a popular hangout spot for teenagers, said vandals knocked over more than 90 headstones, smashed glass vases and scattered flowers left on graves.
Caleb Moore, 27, the son of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, was arrested in Alabama on a misdemeanor criminal trespass charge linked to allegations that he hunted on private property without permission in 2016, an arrest his father called a “cheap political trick.”