Pope Francis named French Cardinal Jean Louis Tauran as the new camerlengo, the person who takes over the day-to-day running of the Holy See after a pope dies or retires until a new pope is elected.
Brian Chellis, 23, of Cedar Grove, N.J., was charged with drunken driving after police say they found him wearing an Elf on the Shelf costume, asleep in a van with its engine running, lights on, music blaring, and with an open can of beer nearby.
Sasha Webb, 26, of Prattville, Ala., a former medical-records clerk at a state prison in Elmore County, was sentenced to nearly six years in prison and ordered to pay $529,000 in restitution in the theft of inmate identification data that were used to file more than $1 million in fraudulent income-tax returns.
Samantha Shaw, the state auditor in Alabama, decorated two Christmas trees outside her office with ornaments bearing the names of hundreds of Alabamans who served in the military, and said the names were sent to her by people from all over the state.
Sharon Wise, 65, a worker at the Maine Street Museum in Augusta, Maine, said she was watching a man, who was acting strangely, when he snatched up a 2-year-old girl and attempted to flee the museum, adding that she was ready for a “big fight” when she stood in front of him and said, “Don’t you touch her; you let her go!”
Tony LeClaire, with the Washington County, N.Y., sheriff’s office, said a woman who had just applied to be a Meals on Wheels driver was arrested on drunken-driving charges after she got into a pickup outside a social services agency and attempted to drive away.
Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, 63, who New Jersey prosecutors said had styled himself as “the Robin Hood of kidneys” and was the first person convicted in federal court of profiting from the illegal sale of human organs, was released from prison after more than two years.
Gen. Mohammed Farid el-Tohamy, Egypt’s intelligence chief, who was considered a hard-liner in the government’s crackdown on Islamists and secular dissidents, was removed from office and replaced by his deputy, Khaled Fawzy.
Frank Corvino, an animal services official in Riverside County, Calif., said a microchip scan on a stray black dog revealed that the animal was actually Coco, a reddish-brown pit bull that had been dyed and was missing for a month.