In the news

■ Pope Francis was asked by an 11-year-old boy during a parish visit in Acilia, a suburb of Rome, whether he played soccer as a child, to which the pope responded that he did but didn’t play very well, and that he was given the nickname “Stiff Leg.”

■ Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, said in an interview with The New York Times that he’s sorry if the social media platform helped put Donald Trump in the White House.

■ Ed Begley Jr., an actor and a board member of the Walden Woods Project, a nonprofit dedicated to the legacy of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century philosopher known for the book Walden, will attend a ceremony at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where the U.S. Postal Service will dedicate its new Thoreau-themed stamp.

■ John Higgins, harbormaster in Ventura, Calif., described as “great news” the fact that a humpback whale, which swam into the harbor and became trapped, was able to escape after rescuers played a loop of whale feeding sounds underwater, near the harbor’s exit.

■ Daphne Page, 52, who was arrested over a fake explosive device in her car that set off a bomb scare in a Short Pump, Va., grocery store parking lot, said the object was a clock, designed to look like a bundle of dynamite, that she bought for $1 at a garage sale.

■ James Bradley Poe, who was cited after his empty car was found submerged in the swimming pool at a Winston-Salem, N.C., apartment complex, told police that the car rolled into the pool after he got out, thinking it was in park, and that he tried to stop the car but had to leave it because he had to go home to care for his son.

■ Andrew Trites, a marine mammal expert, said a sea lion likely mistook a girl’s dress for food when it yanked her into the water off the coast of a Vancouver, British Columbia, suburb, an incident captured in a video that shows a man plunging into the water to help the girl, who was uninjured.

■ Felicia Nevins, a 26-year-old Florida woman trying to get pregnant via artificial insemination, told the Tampa Bay Times that she was mortified after the Pasco County sheriff’s office posted on social media about her call seeking help because she feared that a thermos with dry ice inside, which she was using to store sperm, might explode.