AP - Milwaukee County jail inmates can knock an hour off their sentence for each hour they spend on some dirty work ? cleaning up blood, feces, saliva and other bodily fluids at the House of Correction and Criminal Justice Facility.
AP - A northern Ohio artist known for envelope-pushing holiday displays is back ? with Santa Claus in a wheelchair being pushed down stairs by a crazed tree.
AP - The one that didn’t get away held an unlikely surprise for a Texas man. The blue-stoned class ring of Joe Richardson, engraved with his name, turned up inside an 8-pound bass 21 years after he lost it while fishing on Lake Sam Rayburn.
Reuters - Police have arrested a man in southeastern Nigeria who said in a television documentary he had killed 110 children he believed to be possessed by evil spirits, officials said on Wednesday.
Reuters - “The Sound of Music” has faded in the Austrian city of Salzburg, which has blocked plans to turn the original von Trapp family villa portrayed in the Hollywood favourite into a hotel, says the company behind the idea.
AP - Usually when a charity wants a donor to return, the agency is seeking another contribution. Helping Hands in Bentonville wants the person who left what’s apparently a funerary urn to come back and get it.
AP - A lady lobster with four claws was pulled from the deep this week in the waters off Newport. With a large crusher claw and three pincher claws ? instead of the usual one ? the crustacean was unlike anything 39-year-old lobsterman Patrick Marks had ever seen in his 14 years catching the creatures.
AP - A man using a candy cane lawn ornament fended off a knife-wielding neighbor who had been attacking holiday guests at a Sacramento home. Police spokesman Sgt. Norm Leong saID the man used the two-foot-tall plastic ornament to subdue the attacker until officers arrived.
AP - Authorities in southwest Florida say an intoxicated man had his 9-year-old son take him on a beer run. Cape Coral police arrested the 27-year-old man last week, after seeing a pickup truck drive onto a median.
AP - It may have seemed like a mirage: Two camels nibbling on a pine tree along a street in this desert metropolis on the Texas border. Police tried lassoing the animals, which lunged at the officers with snapping teeth as onlookers chuckled.