In the news
■ George W. Bush says there is no program more pro-life than the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief “that has saved more than 25 million lives” as he urges Congress to keep funding it.
■ Phil Murphy, New Jersey’s governor, is haunted by one school district’s decision to ban All Hallow’s Eve festivities in the name of inclusion, posting, “Seriously? We can’t let kids celebrate Halloween? Give me a break.”
■ Stephanie Jerome, a spokesperson for Noodles & Company, says its restaurant in Beloit, Wis., offered a “2 Buck Mac & Cheese” in honor of a deer’s abrupt entrance that scattered the lunch crowd before it exited out a back door.
■ James Chaney’s blood alcohol level was more than 16 times Alabama’s legal limit, police say, when he was arrested at the end of a Clarke County school bus route after dropping off an unknown number of students.
■ Connor Bowman, am former Mayo Clinic resident and poison specialist, is charged in the murder of his wife, Betty, in Rochester, Minn., after police say he tried to cancel her autopsy and, earlier, searched online for a gout medication that was detected in lethal amounts in her body.
■ Hadas, a Los Angeles Jewish homeowner using only her first name, says she’s very glad the man accused of setting a U.S. flag afire outside of her house was not motivated by antisemitism, though police aren’t saying what his reasons appear to be.
■ Sabih Effendi, a Texas neurosurgeon, says her stroke patient Gabriel Silva may owe his life to the family’s border collie Axel who woke up the teenager’s parents and clawed at his door until his stepfather saw that something was wrong and took Silva to a Houston hospital.
■ Hamid Rahmanian says it hurts, but he has already forgiven the still-atlarge thieves who stole the truck holding nearly 500 shadow puppets and masks after a San Francisco performance of “Song of the North,” an adaptation of a 10th-century Persian epic that Rahmanian had hoped would build a bridge with Western audiences.
■ Heman Bekele, a Fairfax County, Va., middle school student, is America’s Top Young Scientist in a 3M competition after pitching his idea for a low-cost soap to fight skin cancer by reactivating cells — an idea the Ethiopian migrant says he got from watching people constantly working under the sun.