In the news

■ Kelsey Berry of Jackson, Miss., said residents set up a Christmas tree, decorated with lights, garlands and balls, in a small sinkhole in a neighborhood street that posed a hazard to unsuspecting motorists, complete with a sign reading “From our sinkhole to yours.”

■ David McKinney, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., said a midshipman is facing punishment for scaling a 225-foot obelisk at the academy’s chapel to place his cap at its peak in a pregame tradition leading up to the Army-Navy football game.

■ Leroy Rogers Jr., 55, of Fort Myers, Fla., was seriously hurt after he dropped his cellphone and was reaching down to get it when his SUV drifted across the centerline and struck an empty school bus head-on, the state highway patrol said.

■ Jeff “JJ” Johnston, a firefighter in Sunriver, Ore., wearing a red-colored safety suit, used a new vehicle designed to rescue people who have fallen through thin ice to push a young deer to safety after it had gotten stuck trying to walk across a frozen golf course pond.

■ Shaimaa Ahmed, an Egyptian pop singer known by her stage name Shima, was convicted of promoting debauchery and sentenced to two years in prison for a racy video showing her singing in her underwear in front of a group of young men while suggestively eating an apple and a banana.

■ David Berkowitz, 64, the “Son of Sam” serial killer who terrorized New York City 40 years ago and is serving a life sentence, has been transferred from a maximum security prison to a hospital for treatment of a reported heart ailment.

■ Gregory Rottjer faces an attempted-murder charge after police in Shelton, Conn., said he threw a man 45 feet off a bridge into the Housatonic River because the man tried to intervene in an argument between Rottjer and his girlfriend.

■ Richard Hofeld, 80, mayor of Homewood, Ill., who fell through thin ice on a lake while trying to save his dog, was rescued by a mystery good Samaritan who was passing by and used his shirt and couple of jackets to fashion a rope to keep Hofeld from drowning until help arrived.

■ Barbara Kearns, a longtime employee at a WalMart store in Everett, Pa., said she’s never seen such generosity after an anonymous person spent $40,000 to pay off all the items on Christmas layaway at the store, helping about 200 families.