In the news
Khawaja Mohammad Asif, Pakistan’s defense minister, in response to a story on a fake news site in which a former Israeli official threatened a nuclear attack, reminded Israel that “Pakistan is a nuclear state, too,” prompting Israel to tweet back that the story was “totally fictitious.”
Clinton Blackburn, the Surrey, England, police chief, said it took police units, police dogs and a helicopter about an hour to get control of a fight involving as many as 100 people that broke out in the streets of Woking, England, after Christmas Eve festivities “soured.”
Montreal Dixon of Gretna, La., didn’t have time or money to replace her 7-year-old son’s Christmas gifts after their home was burglarized, but police and Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputies teamed up to buy replacements, showing up on Christmas Eve with a car full of wrapped gifts.
Greg Capps, a Connecticut state trooper, arrived just in time to deliver a boy weighing 6 pounds, 2 ounces after a woman, who was on her way to the hospital to give birth, realized the baby wasn’t going to wait and had to pull over on the side of a highway.
Jeshur Robinson, 32, was arrested in the Dallas stabbing death of his father after Robinson was found at a state prison in McAlester, Okla., sitting in his father’s truck with a bloody knife, a wounded hand, and blood on his clothes and the truck, police said.
Paul St. Amand, a Fairfield, Maine, police captain, said Terry Whitney, 63, went to his estranged wife’s home, shut off the power, and set fire to his truck and the house — which his wife escaped unharmed — then fatally stabbed himself in front of officers at the scene.
John Shepherd of Akron, Ohio, while inspecting footprints in the snow in front of a vacant house, found several packages that had been swiped a week earlier from his neighbor Kyle Barron’s porch, and which contained such family heirlooms as Barron’s father’s ashes.
Walter Johnson, 38, was partially successful in appealing his life sentence for grabbing $15 from a parked car, with the court upholding his conviction but agreeing that the sentence, which was mandatory under Louisiana’s habitual-offender law, was excessive.
Dante Hughes faces murder and domestic violence charges in the killing of 24-year-old Joey Gingerella, who police say was shot outside a bar in Groton, Conn., after he intervened in Hughes’ assault on a woman.