In the news
Mike McNeely, police chief in Bath, Ohio, called it one of the most bizarre things he’s heard of in four decades of policing when a 20-year-old man called 911 to request a police dog to help track down heroin he said had been stolen from him.
David Learner, a district attorney in Catawba, N.C., said he won’t file voter-fraud charges against a 67-year-old woman who cast an early ballot for Donald Trump on behalf of her 89-year-old mother, who died several weeks before the November election.
Valerie Ulrich, an elementary school principal in Princeton, N.J., said a thirdgrade class already taking care of a boa constrictor named Cuddles went to the rescue of a stray and sickly 4-foot boa that slithered into their classroom.
Bobby Guidroz, sheriff of St. Landry Parish, La., said two elementary school teachers were arrested on accusations that they bullied a student, with one telling the child to “go and kill yourself,” and the other recorded on surveillance video pushing and yelling at the child.
Bill Gleeson, a firefighter in Darwin, Australia, said a 13-foot female crocodile named Albert seemed unfazed as firefighters fought a house fire near the animal’s backyard enclosure, with Gleeson saying it “seemed quite happy to look at me as I was protecting the premises.”
Evelyn Price, 53, a former mail carrier from Deerfield Beach, Fla., was arrested on federal charges that she accepted money in exchange for giving a man an address on her route where packages containing drugs could be delivered without detection.
Mackenzie Brown, 5, gave a stuffed-toy moose to Towamencin, Pa., police officer James Gibbas last year, saying it would keep him safe, and “Mr. Moosey” has since become a traveling talisman for officers and first-responders after Gibbas passed it along to peers in five other states.
Brian Sims, a gay Philadelphia legislator, struck back at an Internet troll who had posted a slur on Sims’ Facebook page, writing on the troll’s page that he had called the troll’s grandmother and “she and I had a very disappointing chat about you.”
Timothy Anderson of St. Louis lost his appeal of a 2013 drug conviction when the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his argument that he had a religious duty to sell heroin to “the sick, lost, blind, lame, deaf and dead members of God’s Kingdom.”