In the news

Sediq Sediqqi, Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry spokesman, said the country’s forces will be able to provide security for the April presidential election without outside aid, with 6,431 out of 6,845 polling stations already guaranteed as secure.

Michael Gabaldon, co-owner of Romero Cemetery in Albuquerque, N.M., said someone has been leaving dead chickens and chicken parts on the property periodically for the past two years, prompting him to decide to put up a gate to stop the “disgusting and creepy” practice.

Yuri Lutsenko, a top organizer of mass protests in Kiev, Ukraine, and the country’s ex-interior minister, was injured while trying to intervene during a confrontation between riot police and anti-government activists in a scuffle that sent 11 people to the hospital.

Michael Corsey of Waco, Texas, was jailed and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after police say he stabbed, choked and struck his girlfriend because she bought pizza for dinner instead of the chicken sandwich he had requested.

Princess Madeleine of Sweden has decided to give birth to her first child with American banker husband Christopher O’Neill in New York City.

Cindy Johnson of Lebanon, Tenn., has taken her search for a new kidney for her husband to the public, putting up a billboard on Interstate 40 with her photograph, phone number and a plea for the organ, which she says is the last option to improve and extend the life of Bobby Johnson.

Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, a French comic, agreed to stop performing his act, insisting he is not anti-Semitic for deriding the Holocaust and popularizing the “quenelle” hand gesture, which some say is an inverted Nazi salute.

Mohammad Jamal Rashid of Pakistan has pleaded guilty in Texas to drug charges after having more than 7,000 fake erectile-dysfunction pills delivered from China to his Houston home in 2012, and now faces eight years in prison and more than $250,000 in fines.

Ben Carter, executive director of the Dallas Safari Club, defended plans to auction the right to shoot and kill a black rhinoceros in Namibia in a fundraiser for the endangered species, saying before the event, at which the hunting permit sold for $350,000, that the targeted animal is old, male and nonbreeding.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/12/2014

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