In the news

LITTLE ROCK — Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, said in Lebanon, where he was receiving a leadership award, that Middle Eastern countries should adopt their own version of Europe’s Schengen Agreement, which allows for borderless travel among 25 European signatory countries.

Jaison Bilbrew, 26, was arrested in Nashville, Tenn., on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after police say he cut into the line at a Toys R Us store and took a fighting stance when an off-duty officer moonlighting as a security guard tried to send him to the end of the line.

Billy Joel, the 61-year-old pop star known for such hits as “Piano Man,” “Uptown Girl” and “New York State of Mind,” is doing “extremely well” after having both hips replaced last week to correct a congenital condition, a spokesman said.

Leopold McLean, 46, a longtime New York City detective assigned to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s security detail, has been charged with second-degree attempted murder, first-degree assault and other charges over allegations he shot and injured his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend.

Orvin Smith, a Best Buy sales manager in Augusta, Ga., said Marine Cpl. Phillip Duggan was stabbed in the back when Duggan, who was outside the store collecting toys for the service branch’s Toys For Tots program, tried to help out by stopping a suspected shoplifter.

Ana Maria Matute, 85, a Spanish author who is ranked as one of the country’s best post-civil war writers, has won Spain’s 2010 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s top literary honor, the Culture Ministry said.

Nathan Alan Bramlage, 23, a suspect in a Eugene, Ore., bank robbery, was arrested after he walked into the Eugene police station to use a public phone in the lobby to call his parents and an officer recognized him from the bank’s surveillance video.

Doug Plude, 43, has been sentenced in Eagle River, Wis., to 25 years in prison for drowning his wife in a toilet in 1999.

Rich Edwards, an Oklahoma chiropractor who was the first patient in Louisville, Ky., to receive a double hand transplant, told WDRB-TV that he may lose the fingertips on his right thumb and pinkie because his body started to reject the new limbs, but otherwise was doing well, adding: “I’ve been blessed with two beautiful hands. I can spare a couple of fingertips.”