In the news

Dalton Shaffer, 18, with Steve’s Pizza in Michigan, said he “just wanted to make them happy” and drove 225 miles to deliver pizza to Julie Morgan after learning that she and her husband, Rich Morgan, both Indiana transplants, couldn’t travel to Michigan for her birthday because of Rich’s cancer treatments.

Danita Tutt, 42, of north Texas, was convicted of causing injury to a child and attempted murder for withholding food from her son and subjecting the child to several needless surgeries after Tutt lied to doctors about the boy’s symptoms.

Gabriel Rendon-Villasana, 33, who kidnapped and raped at least two women in the Atlanta area while posing as an Uber driver, was sentenced to life in prison plus 60 years.

Devon Golding, 72, a former St. Louis doctor, was convicted of conspiracy and four health care fraud counts after he and others paid kickbacks to doctors who sent blood and urine samples to a lab run by co-conspirators from 2009 to 2012.

Rick Hutzell, editor of the Capital Gazette, an Annapolis, Md., newspaper where five people were killed in a shooting in June, credited his staff and colleagues after he was named the Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year, saying, “We put the paper out, together.”

Robert Thomas, a Louisiana professor and environmental biologist who has been studying snakes since the 1970s, said he was very honored after a team of Brazilian and Ecuadorean biologists decided to name one of three newly identified species of snakes from the Galapagos Islands after him.

Michael Dunn, 47, a city commissioner in Lakeland, Fla., who also co-owns an Army-Navy surplus store, was charged with second-degree murder after fatally shooting Christobal Lopez, 50, a homeless man whom Dunn suspected of stealing a hatchet from his shop, police said.