• President Barack Obama spent the first day of his annual holiday vacation in Hawaii playing more than four hours of golf at the Marine base on the island of Oahu, where he was born.
• Michael Kenneth McAlister, 60, who was awarded $1.2 million for the nearly 30 years he spent wrongfully imprisoned over an attempted rape in Virginia, risks losing the cash if he is convicted on charges -- including felony possession of cocaine -- that he faces in Florida, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
• Anna Pakarinen, who helps set up a wood-burning holiday sauna in Helsinki's City Hall courtyard, said the annual arrangement helps make "a good city a livable and a lovable city."
• Oren Aharon Cohen, 34, was arrested in Tempe, Ariz., and faces charges including second-degree burglary, a police report said, after a man woke in his home to the sound of his 2-year-old daughter crying and found Cohen sitting in the living room with the toddler, whom Cohen then tossed onto the couch while telling the father, "I'm your friend."
• David Aromin with LifeMed Alaska was one of more than 1,000 people in Anchorage who dressed up in elaborate costumes or stripped down to barely anything, to take part in a polar plunge to raise money for Special Olympics Alaska.
• John Peterson, 33, told Palisade, Minn., investigators that he threw his 5-week-old daughter 12 feet across his home's living room and into the kitchen because she was being fussy, inflicting fatal injuries, NBC affiliate KARE 11 reported.
• Linda Hopper, who lives at the Mercy Village senior housing complex in Joplin, Mo., said that after managers ordered the removal of religious Christmas decorations from common areas, it was as though someone with a vacuum cleaner had "sucked the joy out" of the quarters.
• Chris Goranitis of the Aventura, Fla., police said an Uber driver was shuttling a passenger when a minivan cut him off and a would-be robber wielding two handguns emerged, but that the Uber driver, who has a concealed weapons permit, pulled out his own handgun and fatally shot the person.
• Nick Knight, a fashion photographer, said he sought to show "warmth and humanity as well as strength and tradition" in a new portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in which she is seated and looking determinedly ahead while the heir to her throne, Prince Charles, stands beside her, looking down at his mother with smiling affection.
A Section on 12/19/2016