In the news
Calvin Baldwin of Boutte, La., said his dog, Rusty, started scratching at his arm to wake him up during a morning fire, allowing him to grab the dog and escape the flames and smoke that engulfed his house.
Sandra McClung, 75, attacked and robbed of a loaf of bread while using a mobility scooter outside an Atlanta-area Wal-Mart earlier this year, hopes that newly released security camera photos will help police identify the woman who repeatedly punched her.
Sara Goldrick-Rab,a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, is donating the $100,000 prize she won for her research into the rising cost of college to a fund she established to help students cope with financial emergencies not covered by traditional aid.
Nick Moore, a doctor at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, England, said Vanellope Wilkins, who was born with her heart outside her body, is in the pediatric intensive-care unit after surviving three surgeries, including one within an hour of her birth to place her heart into her chest cavity.
Catherine Curtin, a Tulsa County, Okla., sheriff’s deputy, is being praised for her decision, while facing a knife-wielding man, to put her firearm away and instead use her stun gun to subdue the 60-yearold, who later said he was trying to provoke a police shooting.
Don Epps, a high school principal in Diamond, Mo., said residents who were upset when vandals torched the school’s snowman made of hay bales replaced it with two snowmen, one made of metal and the other made of silage and materials salvaged from the fire.
Adrian Allison, a school superintendent in Canton, Ohio, said a 48-year-old high school teacher was suspended with pay after a cellphone video surfaced showing him wrapping his arm around a student’s neck and taking the teen to the floor inside a classroom.
Mark Stetter, 48, of Buffalo, N.Y., who sought a coffee shop discount by claiming he was a detective and flashing a fake badge and what turned out to be a BB gun, was charged with impersonating a police officer and other counts, authorities said.
Ali Baydoun, 52, of Dearborn Heights, Mich., pleaded guilty to conspiring with a brother and a nephew to pay $150,000 in bribes to suburban Detroit officials to obtain a permit for a medical-marijuana dispensary, federal prosecutors said.