In the news
Laura Sherr, spokesman for the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif., said the center is caring for an emaciated baby northern fur seal that was found hiding in some bushes at a San Francisco Bay Area business park and that police initially thought was a “possum or a weird cat.”
Norwood Thomas, 93, of Virginia Beach, Va., will be able to travel to Adelaide, Australia, to reunite on Valentine’s Day with his World War II girlfriend, 88-year-old Joyce Morris, after more than 300 people raised $7,500 to cover the trip’s cost.
Track Palin, 26, eldest son of former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, was charged with three misdemeanors in a domestic-violence case in which his girlfriend said he punched her in the head and threatened to fire a rifle, documents said.
Anthony Sarni was allowed by a judge to return to work as a police officer in Edison, N.J., while he appeals his 2013 dismissal over entering a woman’s hotel room as he investigated a prank fire alarm and asking her to try on lingerie for him.
Darryl Green, 42, of East Falmouth, Mass., was sentenced to two years in prison for larceny after he went to a house looking for drugs and found two people stabbed to death, but rather than report the double homicide to police, he stole $240 from the scene.
James Stanley, a spokesman for Canada’s Ontario Provincial Police, said an 80-year-old man who said he was too old and weak to brush off his car was ticketed for driving what resembled a moving pile of snow with only a small section of the driver’s-side windshield cleared for him to see through.
Scott Kelly, commander of the International Space Station, proved that he has a green thumb, posting a picture of a once-ailing but now-thriving zinnia with an orange-yellow bloom that he nursed back to health in the station’s mini-greenhouse.
Lonny Haschel, with the Texas Department of Public Safety, said officers serving a warrant in an Arlington theft investigation arrested two people after finding about 100 marijuana plants growing in a 9-foot-deep pit under a backyard deck.
The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a spokesman for the Vatican, said a homeless woman who gave birth on a piece of cardboard near St. Peter’s Square was offered a year-long stay at a Vatican-owned residence for mothers and babies, and is considering the offer.