• Cindy Menkes said "the magic of this time of year" was taken away from some children when a man yelled "there's no Santa Claus" over and over during the Cape Coral Festival of Lights in Florida, with police saying the man was exercising his right to free speech and committing no crime.
• Harry Little, 67, of St. Louis, was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus 15 years for the 2014 slaying of his girlfriend Sylvia Brown, 59, after having already served about 17 years in the 1977 deaths of his estranged wife Sharon Little, 26, and his friend Hargrove Bunting, 25.
• Willie Newson, 47, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, was arrested in Marietta, Ga., on charges of child exploitation after authorities said he was trying to meet up with an undercover officer who was posing as a teen on a dating app.
• David Oris, 52, faces 43 charges of invasion of privacy as well as several felony counts after police in Newberry Township, Pa., said he posted to his blog hundreds of images and videos of women secretly recorded at gyms and stores in town.
• Ramsey Bearse, 28, a former Miss Kentucky who is a teacher in Cross Lanes, W.Va., was charged with sending nude pictures to a 15-year-old former student after the teen's parents said they found the photos on his phone.
• Sarah Page, who is studying meat science at Ohio State University, said the campus's bacon vending machine, which offers bacon strips and bits for $1, has turned out to be more popular than expected and needs to be restocked four or five times a day.
• Andrea Gaylord, who fled her Paradise, Calif., home when a wildfire broke out, said she couldn't ask for a better dog than her male Anatolian shepherd named Madison after the dog protected the ruins of her home until she returned almost a month later.
• Charles Littnan, lead scientist of a Hawaiian monk seal research program, said if monk seals could understand humans, he would "gently plead for them to stop" snorting eels, saying that there have been three or four sightings of seals that had dead eels dangling out of their nostrils.
• Mark Taylor, 49, and Marlon Caldwell, 51, both former St. Louis police officers, pleaded guilty to taking money in exchange for providing unredacted accident reports to chiropractor Mitchell Davis in violation of department policy.
A Section on 12/09/2018