• Raymond Flannelly, a fire chief in Montgomery County, Texas, said firefighters responding to a house fire found a second-floor room full of snakes and lizards and "carefully" brought more than 100 snakes to safety, although "a couple" of lizards died in the fire.
• Paula Stanton of Somers Point, N.J., is wearing her diamond-encrusted gold wedding ring again nine years after she accidentally flushed it down a toilet, thanks to a maintenance worker who spotted a shiny object near a manhole about 400 feet from her home.
• Mikhail Popkov, 54, a retired police lieutenant from Angarsk, Siberia, already serving a life sentence for 22 killings, was convicted of murdering 56 women between 1994 and 2000 and was stripped of his police pension and sentenced to additional life terms, prosecutors said.
• Steven Reeves, a black middle-school music teacher in Cincinnati, apologized and said he was "insensitive" for sending home a letter warning students against having "Mohawks, Large Afros, or any other outlandish" hairstyles for an upcoming chorus concert.
• Dennis Robbins, co-owner of an antique store in Asheboro, N.C., said "it sounded like a bomb went off" when a deer jumped through a plate-glass window, barreled its way through the shop and smashed a second window to escape, leaving bloodstains along its path.
• Kael Williams, a high school student in Delray Beach, Fla., called it "particularly disgusting" after video spread on social media of a large rat climbing the rows of packaged snacks and drinks in a school vending machine.
• Julia Ponder, director of a Minneapolis raptor rescue center, said a red-tailed hawk captured after living for days with an arrow in its right leg had to be put down because veterinarians couldn't repair the damage and it would have suffered constant pain if kept in captivity.
• Kevin Esterly, 45, of Allentown, Pa., who pleaded guilty to checking a teenager out of school without her mother's knowledge and fleeing to Mexico with her, has been sentenced to 2½ to five years in prison, prosecutors said.
• Adrian Alarcon, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said officials are still tabulating how much money was taken by two newly retired nuns who admitted embezzling tuition payments and other funds over the past decade to pay for gambling trips to Las Vegas.
A Section on 12/11/2018