Abandoned Christmas Baby Wrings Out Joy on Noel

--A hospital caring for a premature baby abandoned near a Laundromat in subfreezing weather on Christmas Day has been flooded with calls from people wanting to adopt the child, a spokeswoman said. “We’ve gotten lots and lots of people who have called and wanted to adopt her,” spokeswoman Teresa Luneau said of the infant girl, named Joy Noel by nurses in the intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, Ark. The 2-pound, 3-ounce baby, who was about 30 minutes old when officers found her, was listed in good condition. Police Lt. R. L. Jenkins said that the infant was discovered lying against the wall of a 24-hour Laundromat about 4 a.m. Wednesday in a business area in southwest Little Rock after a woman who did not give her name called police. “Basically, she said she had found a baby at the side of the Laundromat and she hung up before anything else could be said to her. We sent a car over there right away,” Jenkins said, adding that the child was not wearing “a whole lot of clothes.” The temperature was 11 degrees at the time. “She’s fine today,” Luneau said. “She’s off her breathing machine and doing extremely well.”

--A restaurant owner who started a pay-what-you-want policy last Christmas season because “I thought the Lord wanted this done” is back to normal menu prices a year later. “From the day we started with no prices till the day we put ‘em back, customers said they didn’t like it,” said Jerry Juliano, a born-again Christian and owner of the Corner Stone restaurant in Warrendale, Pa. His you-name-the-price eatery drew a flurry of publicity and attracted customers from many states. But the customers didn’t want to cheat him and felt uncomfortable, he discovered, and his idea didn’t work. “I just sat back and watched it,” he said.

--Location scouts for the TV show “Miami Vice” recently approached Generoso Pope, publisher of the National Enquirer, to ask his permission to film inside his spacious seaside mansion. Pope declined the invitation. It was a question of privacy, he said.