In the news
■ John Brueggen, director of the Alligator Farm Zoological Park in St. Augustine, Fla., said Chance the Snapper, an alligator that eluded capture for days in a Chicago lagoon, was welcomed to the park with a banner, pizza and the band Chicago’s greatest hits.
■ Shanard Zelron Banks, 30, who is accused of controlling an illegal pill-pressing operation in which thousands of counterfeit pills were tainted with heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs, pleaded guilty to drug and firearms charges, according to federal prosecutors in Baton Rouge.
■ Walter Ray Wolfe, an OB-GYN physician in Canton, Miss., had his medical license temporarily suspended after a complaint that he had an affair with one of his married employees and tried to insert abortion-inducing drugs into her while she was pregnant with his child, who was later born.
■ Mayra Gallegos-Balderas, 23, a now-former correctional officer in Liberty County, Texas, was charged with theft of property after she was accused of stealing nearly $1,500 from inmates who surrendered their cash when they were booked into the county jail.
■ Ed Poolos, deputy commissioner for Alabama’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, said live stand-ins for Santa’s reindeer won’t be allowed from out of state this year as part of Alabama’s precautions against chronic wasting disease, a deadly illness that affects deer.
■ Tenille Fox, spokesman for Orange County Animal Services in North Carolina, said a 5-foot-tall, 100-pound emu that has been running loose in the state for more than three weeks, twice evading animal control officials, has become “quite a sensation.”
■ De’Erica Cooks, 22, of St. Augustine, Fla., is accused of threatening another woman with a steak knife after the woman denied her a pizza slice when she asked for one, with Cooks telling police that she didn’t remember much about the incident.
■ John Bel Edwards, governor of Louisiana, asked people to not feed alligators after officials said there have been more gator sightings because of high water, and wildlife biologists warned that feeding the reptiles increases the chance that they will bite someone.
■ Paul Jinkerson Jr. was sentenced to 59 years in prison for his role in the shooting death of his stepfather, 51-year-old Frank Ancona Jr., who was a Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard in Missouri.