In the news

Maria Ullah, a 6-yearold Pakistani girl who has a genetic disorder known as Morquio syndrome in which the vertebrae can develop abnormally and compress the spinal cord, has been issued a visa — denied twice previously — so she can travel to a Delaware hospital for treatment.

Patrick Weems, director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Miss., said more than $20,000 has been raised to replace a bullet-riddled historical marker for the black teenager whose 1955 slaying help propel the civil-rights movement.

Casey Corbett, a police officer in Sheffield, Ala., said things got “pretty crazy” for about two hours before police and game wardens figured out how to get a trapped deer out a front door after it wandered into a downtown building that’s under renovation.

Asher Woodworth, 30, of Portland, Maine, draped himself in evergreen branches and then twice sauntered slowly across a busy downtown intersection before being arrested on a charge of obstructing a public way, authorities said, adding he told police he wanted to see how he might affect “people’s natural choreography.”

Donald Teaford of Hopewell, Pa., was arrested on an abuse of corpse charge after a tipster reported that the plastic-wrapped body of a person who had died three weeks earlier was stashed under Teaford’s bed, according to police.

Joey Marron, a Los Angeles fire inspector, said that while nearly three dozen fish, reptiles and other animals perished, firefighters rescued 250 other animals, including rabbits and birds, when an early-morning fire ripped through a pet shop.

Kathryn Peterson, an FBI agent in Norman, Okla., said investigators are looking for a man wearing a black T-shirt featuring a cat posing for a jail mugshot photo, after the man handed a bank teller a note demanding money and then ran off with an undisclosed amount of cash.

Terrance Sanders of the Canton, Miss., Public Works Department said a flea infestation in one neighborhood, attributed to a high number of stray animals, forced the city to declare an emergency that will require street-by-street spraying to kill off the bugs.

Paula Pierce of Hampton, N.H., whose father tossed into the Atlantic Ocean a bottle containing a note that jokingly offered a $150 reward to anyone who returned the message, made good on the offer more than 50 years later, after Clint Buffington of Utah found the bottle while vacationing in the Turks and Caicos.