In the news
■ Luke Littler, a 16-yearold debuting at the World Darts Championship in London, came within one match of becoming the tournament’s youngest winner and a jackpot of $630,000 at the raucous event where grown men dress like babies while other revelers’ costumes included characters from Alice in Wonderland and traffic cones.
■ Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s prime minister, is hailing as “an event of global importance” the reopening of Aigai, the ancient Macedonian capital — the site of Alexander the Great’s crowning — after 16 years of restoration work at a cost of more than $20 million.
■ Malgorzata Paletko, deputy manager of KTOZ Shelter for Homeless Animals in Krakow, Poland, said staffers “are keeping our fingers crossed” that some of the the 120 dogs recently adopted “will stay with people permanently,” as temperatures were forecast to fall to around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of southern Poland.
■ Karel Felipe, 42, of Miami Shores, Fla., and Tamara Quicutis, 54, of Hialeah, Fla., were sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison and ordered to pay back more than $44 million to the U.S. government for conspiring with others to submit $93 million in false Medicare claims.
■ Reginald Scott, who is Black, found his red Ford Mustang vandalized with black spray paint, spelling out “Merry Christmas,” followed by a racial slur and swastikas on the bumper in the San Pedro neighborhood in Los Angeles.
■ David Straley, an executive of North American Coal, said miners at the Freedom Mine near Beulah, N.D., “were very fortunate, lucky to find” a 7-foot-long mammoth tusk.
■ Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian rightwing extremist who killed 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage in 2011, is trying to sue the government as he claims his solitary confinement since being imprisoned in 2012 amounts to inhumane treatment under the European Convention of Human Rights.
■ Pope Francis used a shell-shaped container to baptize 16 babies in the Sistine Chapel in what has become an annual tradition near the end of the Christmas holiday period at the Vatican.
■ Russ McSpadden, a southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said he’s “certain” that a jaguar captured on camera in the Huachuca Mountains near Tucson, Ariz., “is a new jaguar, previously unknown to the United States.”