In the news

■ Carl Everhart, assistant fire marshal in Lancaster, Pa., said a man having problems with several opossums tried to scare them off by setting fire to a pile of leaves in his backyard but ended up burning his house down when the fire got out of control.

■ Shane Ladner, a former police officer in Holly Springs, Ga., was convicted on six of seven charges related to his falsely saying he received a military Purple Heart and using his claims to qualify for free vehicle license plates.

■ Steve Linders, a police spokesman in St. Paul, Minn., said two men were arrested after officers stopped an SUV for ignoring a stop sign and found in the cargo area a goat stolen from a city park where it had been placed to eat invasive weeds.

■ Alejandro Curiel said he had just stopped his flatbed truck beside a San Francisco curb when the vehicle started slowly dropping as a sinkhole opened beneath it, forcing him to scramble out as the rig tilted onto its passenger side in the hole.

■ Natalia Martinez, an Argentine climber stranded when avalanches blocked her way out during a solo climb on Mount Logan, Canada’s highest mountain, was rescued when a team was able to reach her during a break in the weather.

■ Michael Levy, 48, pulled out a handgun and fired several shots toward an SUV, wounding a passenger in the arm, after the SUV’s driver became angry that Levy’s wife had blocked the handicapped parking spaces as she practiced parking her car at a popular park in Miami, police said.

■ Ethan Roncace got his still-working cellphone back after his father, Craig, used an app to track the phone, accidentally tossed in the trash, to a waste-to-energy facility in Camden, N.J., where it took him about 30 minutes of digging through a mountain of trash to find it.

■ Chen Shulong was removed as vice governor of China’s Anhui province and expelled from the Communist Party for undisclosed “superstitious activities,” as well as for trading power for sex and money, the country’s anti-corruption commission announced.

■ Neal Foster and other Alaskan legislators are calling on a colleague, state Rep. David Eastman of Wasilla, to apologize for saying there are women in Alaska who try to get pregnant so they can use Medicaid funds to get a “free trip” to Anchorage to have abortions.