Former Penn State president to start trial

Former Penn State president to start trial

HARRISBURG, PA.

Penn State’s former president faces trial today on charges that children were put at risk by how he responded to complaints about Jerry Sandusky more than 15 years ago, and two of his former top lieutenants who just pleaded guilty in the case could testify against him.

A Harrisburg jury will decide whether Graham Spanier’s handling of the Sandusky scandal amounted to the three felonies he stands accused of – two counts of endangering the welfare of children and a single conspiracy charge.

Girl, pet duck fly to LA for TV program

FREEPORT, MAINE

A Maine girl has gone to sleepovers and trick-or-treating with her pet duck. Now they’re going on a national TV program together.

Morse Street Elementary School student Kylie Brown and her pet duck, Snowflake, took the internet by storm last year when a video of them was featured on TV. On Sunday, 6-year-old Kylie and Snowflake were appearing on TV again courtesy of Steve Harvey’s “Little Big Shots” show on NBC.

Mike Brown, Kylie’s father, said the duck thinks Kylie is its mother.

Canadian wins $1M global teacher prize

DUBAI, U.A.E.

A Canadian schoolteacher who encourages hope and acts of kindness in an isolated corner of Quebec won a $1 million prize Sunday in what has become one of the most high-profile awards for teaching excellence. Maggie MacDonnell was awarded the annual Global Teacher Prize during a ceremony in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, beating out thousands of applicants from around the world.

She has worked for the past six years in a remote Arctic village called Salluit teaching middle- and high-schoolers. According to her biography, Salluit is home to the second-northernmost Inuit indigenous community in Quebec, with a population of just over 1,300, and can only be reached by air.

Tests find drugs in Paris airport attacker

PARIS

Blood tests determined Sunday that a suspected Islamic extremist consumed drugs and alcohol before a frenzied spree of violence that ended when he took a soldier hostage at Paris’ Orly Airport and was shot dead by her fellow patrolmen.

The Paris prosecutors’ office said toxicology tests conducted as part of an autopsy found traces of cocaine and cannabis in the blood of the suspect, Ziyed Ben Belgacem.

He also had 0.93 grams of alcohol per liter of blood when he died Saturday, the prosecutors’ office said. That is nearly twice the legal limit for driving in France.

The 39-year-old Frenchman with a long criminal record of drugs and robbery offences stopped at a bar in the wee hours Saturday morning, around four hours before he first fired bird shot at traffic police. Then, 90 minutes later, he attacked the military patrol at Orly.

Lobster-crazy China sets import record

ROCKPORT, Maine

The expanding market for lobsters in China is continuing to grow, with the country setting a new record for the value of its imports of the crustaceans from the U.S.

American lobster was almost unheard of in most of China until 2010, when the value of imports grew 250 percent to about $7.4 million. Last year, China imported more than $108 million in lobsters from America, surpassing the previous high of about $90.2 million in 2014.

Chinese importers took in more than 14 million pounds of U.S. lobsters last year, which was also a record. The previous high was about 13.1 million pounds the previous year.

Associated Press