In the news

Gov. Lincoln Chafee, a Rhode Island independent whose use of the term “holiday tree,” rather than “Christmas tree,” last year sparked protests, gave the public 30 minutes’ notice for this year’s tree-lighting ceremony at the Statehouse - this coming after his spokesman said earlier that he would skip the treelighting altogether.

Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, N.J., said he will honor a challenge he made to a Twitter follower and will try to live on the monetary equivalent of food stamps, about $1.40 a meal, for at least a week, starting Tuesday.

Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami, a Qatari poet whose poem “Tunisian Jasmine” praised that country’s popular uprising, which touched off the Arab Spring rebellions across the Middle East, and contained the statement, “We are all Tunisia,” has been sentenced to life in prison for insulting Qatar’s emir and encouraging the overthrow of the nation’s ruling system.

George H.W. Bush, 88, was in stable condition at a Houston hospital where a spokesman said the former president had been for nearly a week undergoing treatment of a lingering cough, which was related to a bout of bronchitis.

Delwar Hossain, owner of a Bangladeshi clothing factory where a fire killed 112 people, said he was never informed that the facility was required to have an “emergency exit, which could be made accessible from outside,” adding that he would have installed one, but “nobody ever suggested that I do it.”

Jeff Zucker, former chief at NBC Universal, has been named president of CNN and said he intends to see that CNN remains “true to its ideals of great journalism,” but is also “vibrant and exciting.”

Philip Hanlon, 57, provost of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has been named president of Dartmouth College, replacing Jim Yong Kim, who left the New Hampshire school in July to lead the World Bank.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/30/2012

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