In the news
Matthew Emanuel and his wife, Maria, thought the rusting hulk of metal jutting out beneath some trees near their Staten Island, N.Y., home was just a cable box, but it turned out to be a safe containing diamonds, gold, jade and cash taken from a neighbor’s home during a 2011 burglary.
Dakota Pitts, 5, asked his mother if one of his father’s friends could drive him to school on his first day back after his father, Rob Pitts, a Terre Haute, Ind., police officer, died in a shootout on May 4, and the boy arrived with the friend to find about 70 law enforcement officers lining the entrance to welcome him.
Alex Barker, a school board member in Columbia, Mo., said a committee wanted students to feel welcome and included in recommending that Robert E. Lee Elementary School be renamed Locust Street Expressive Arts Elementary School.
Katia Sastre, 42, a police officer in Suzano, Brazil, was off-duty when she confronted a gunman who tried to rob some schoolchildren, pulling out her personal handgun to shoot the robber in the chest and leg and then pinning him to the ground until help arrived.
Lewis Pinkham, police chief of Milbridge, Maine, said a town resident who left the state for the winter in November returned home in April to find that someone had broken into his house and stolen nine rifles, eight pistols and about 45,000 rounds of ammunition.
Justin McKinley said the cost to repair a neighbor’s home in D’Iberville, Miss., is still being determined after a live oak that had stood for seven centuries split in half, sending 4 tons of wood onto the house.
Diane Nahabedian, spokesman for the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, R.I., said two workers were hurt when an 800-pound Himalayan takin, described as a horned “goat-antelope,” rammed its way out of its enclosure and ran loose for about an hour before being recaptured.
Kim Reynolds, the governor of Iowa, said her decision was “just like” any other state board appointment when she named her 78-year-old father, Charles Strawn, to an unpaid, sixyear term on a panel that helps select state judges.
Johnny Ellis, a former Alaska state senator, wrote “WOW” on social media after a naked man was tackled and locked in a lavatory by other passengers after he ran yelling up and down the center aisle on a plane as it landed in Anchorage.