The World - Aug. 6, 2009

THURSDAY

The New York Times reports sluggers Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were among the 104 Major League Baseball players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003. In 2004, the duo led the Boston Red Sox to the team’s first World Series in 86 years.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control warned outbreaks of the H1N1 flu could surge this fall as children who attended summer camps return to school.

Portuguese officials captured an escaped prisoner who had been hiding out in caves after 16 years on the run. The 54-year-old man had been serving a 10-year sentence for murder when he escaped in 1993.

FRIDAY

President Barack Obama played bartender-in-chief at a White House “beer summit” with Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, who is black, and police Sergeant James Crowley, who is white. Crowley arrested Gates for disorderly conduct on July 16 after a confrontation at the professor’s home, sparking a media storm.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee passes a rule that would prevent drug makers from making generic copies of biotech drugs for 12 years.

The owner of a popular collection of “high quality” cadavers has sued the manager of an exhibition at New York’s South Street Seaport, seeking to prevent it from taking control of the bodies.

A restaurant owner in southwest Turkey was shot dead after he tried to prevent his customers from smoking to comply with a new law on the use of tobacco indoors.

WEEKEND

Thousands of Americans took advantage over the past week of the U.S. government’s “Cash for Clunkers” incentive of up to $4,500 to trade in older gas-guzzlers for newer, more fuel-efficient cars. The sudden rush of demand at car dealerships quickly exhausted the $1 billion allocated for the program and drove U.S. auto sales to their highest level of 2009

The remains of U.S. Navy pilot Captain Michael Scott Speicher were found and identified, more than 18 years after he was shot down over Iraq and became the first U.S. casualty of the first Gulf War.

An Austrian pianist performed two newly discovered pieces by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for the first time in public on Sunday in a house where the master composer once lived. The concerto movement and a prelude were originally judged by their archivist, the International Mozarteum Foundation, to be anonymous works. Further analysis determined they had been composed by Mozart when he was 7 or 8 years old.

The Miss Landmine Cambodia beauty pageant, in which landmine victims were to compete to win a prosthetic limb, has been cancelled after the Cambodian government said it was in bad taste.

MONDAY

Aberdeen city officials are considering the fate of a stone marker in a park honoring late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. A new granite marker at the park contains a Cobain quote “Drugs are bad for you. They will f—- you up,” – but without the censored F word.

Stu Rasmussen, the transgender mayor of Silverton, Ore., was censured by the city council Monday night after wearing an open-back bathing suit, mini skirt and high heels to speak before a group of kids for a non-profit group.

Somali pirates holding a German ship with five Germans, three Russians, two Ukrainians and 14 Filipinos on board received a $2.7 million ransom and are counting it before releasing the ship.

China has sealed off a remote far-western town of 10,000 people after two people died of pneumonic plague. Another 10 people had contracted the disease in the ethnically Tibetan region of the sparsely populated province of Qinghai.

TUESDAY

The value of U.S. farm land has fallen 3.2 percent this year due to the recession, the first drop for farm land since the agricultural recession of the mid-1980s.

Marine scientists from California are venturing to the middle of the North Pacific to study the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a gathering of plastic debris accumulating across hundreds of miles of open ocean.

Former President Bill Clinton returned to America with two American journalists after negotiating their release from custody of North Korean authorities.

WEDNESDAY

Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott introduced legislation that calls for studying the impact of removing the four Lower Snake River dams to aid salmon recovery in the Columbia Basin.

Paula Abdul announced on Twitter she would quit the top-rated U.S. television show “American Idol,” ending weeks of speculation about her future as a judge on the popular singing contest

A senior Russian general on Wednesday shrugged off Washington’s concern about Cold War-style patrols of Russian nuclear submarines off the U.S. coast, saying it was business as usual for Moscow to keep its navy in shape.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in as Iran’s president on Wednesday, nearly eight weeks after a disputed election that unleashed the worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution and divided the political and clerical elite.