In the news

■ Krystal Whipple, 21, sought for nearly two weeks by Las Vegas police who said she skipped out on a $35 manicure and used a stolen car to run over and kill a salon worker who tried to stop her, was arrested on murder and robbery charges in Glendale, Ariz., authorities said.

■ Catie Poole, a five-year veteran of the Nashville, Tenn., Police Department, has been named the department’s first liaison officer to the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer residents as police push to build relationships with community groups.

■ Tom Caldwell of Concord, Mass., paid $204,000 for a rare bronze 1943 Lincoln penny after the man who found it in his change more than 70 years ago directed all proceeds from the coin’s sale after his death to the public library in Pittsfield, where he was a frequent patron.

■ Isaias Garcia, 30, of Garland, Texas, faces up to a year in jail after pleading guilty to unlawful restraint for placing a 3-foot alligator on top of another man at a Connecticut hotel in an attempt to extort $800 from the victim’s aunt, prosecutors said.

■ Richard Taverna, a retired financial consultant, said there was “never any question” about doing the right thing when he returned a purse containing an envelope filled with $100 bills totalling $10,000 to a Manhattan woman who accidentally left it on a subway bench near Lincoln Center.

■ Ramon Vazquez, a surgeon in West Palm Beach, Fla, was fined $3,000 by the state medical board and settled a civil malpractice suit after he removed a woman’s healthy kidney that he thought was a tumor during a back operation.

■ Kyle Merena, 29, who led law enforcement officers on a chase through two states and then got out of his car naked when it crashed after being stopped using spike strips near Philadelphia’s airport, was charged with driving under the influence of a controlled substance, police said.

■ Syeda Sirajuddin, 35, of Ballwin, Mo., faces child endangerment, assault and other charges after police said her 9-year-old daughter stopped Sirajuddin’s knife attack on the girl’s 5-yearold brother.

■ Gabrellen Pfarr, 83, of Lancaster, Pa., who has a few months to live after halting her cancer treatments, is trying to find a home for the 15-foot-long philodendron plant that she’s nurtured for 10 years because no one in her family has enough room or natural light to take it.