The World - Nov. 5, 2009

THURSDAY

Astronomers at Britain’s University of Leicester have seen the furthest back in time ever, measuring light from a star that exploded 13 billion years ago, just after the dawn of the universe. They traced a gamma-ray burst called GRB 090423 to see the light from the massive star that died 630 million years after the Big Bang that brought the universe into being.

The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished, according to a report published David Barber, Canada’s Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba. Barber said the disappearance will connect the Atlantic to the Pacific over North America for the first time in history.

A team of adventurers is preparing to set sail from San Francisco for Sydney in a catamaran made entirely of reclaimed plastic bottles.

FRIDAY

Members of the Matis tribe in the remote Amazon rainforest in Brazil saved the lives of nine health workers whose Cessna crashed into a river on a vaccination campaign to the most remote areas of the Amazon basin. The area is home to a handful of Indian tribes that have little contact with the outside world.

Rescue teams searched the ocean off Southern California for nine people missing after a mid-air crash between a U.S. Coast Guard plane and a Marine Corps helicopter off San Clemente Island.

Buckling under intense international pressure, Honduras’ rebel de facto government agrees to allow exiled Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was toppled in a military coup four months ago, to return.

WEEKEND

Rain fell on China’s drought-stricken northern wheat-growing provinces, as the Chinese government launched jets and rockets to seed clouds over 800,000 hectares of farmland. As much as 40 mm of rain fell in areas.

Delaware moves ahead of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands to become the most secretive financial jurisdiction in the world, according to a report from the Tax Justice Network, a conservative tax policy think-tank.

Drug warriors in Mexico killed fifteen

people on an isolated ranch near the U.S. border. Margarito Montes, a well-known organizer of agricultural laborers, was among the bodies found riddled with bullets. More than 15,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-led assault on cartels in 2006.

MONDAY

An outbreak of food-borne illness, linked to E. coli bacteria from ground beef, sickened 28 people and may have caused two deaths in the U.S. Northeast.

Kosovo’s Albanian majority unveiled a statue of former US president Bill Clinton to thank him for saving them by stopping a wave of ethnic cleansing by Serbia.

Architects for the Barcelona-based Galactic Suite Space Resort said their proposed space hotel is on target to accept its first paying guests in 2012. A three-night stay at the hotel will cost $4.4 million. During their stay, guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and travel around the world every 80 minutes.

TUESDAY

Moscow Mayor Nancy Chaney holds a slim, 40-vote lead over challenger John Weber in her re-election bid. Chaney received 2,095 votes in the initial count to Weber’s 2,055.

Voters in Maine voted 52 percent to overturn a law allowing same-sex couples to wed.

Republicans Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey were elected to the Governor’s seat in their respective states. Some politicos said their elections showed the limits of President Barack Obama’s political clout, one year into office. Obama campaigned heavily for their democratic opponents.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who engineered a change in the city’s term-limits law so he could run again, narrowly won a third term with 51 percent of the vote.

WEDNESDAY

Anthony Sowell, a convicted rapist in Cleveland was charged with multiple murders after police dug up 10 corpses at his home. Four bodies were found in the back yard, while six others were discovered elsewhere on the property, including in the basement. A skull wrapped in a paper bag in a bucket could be an eleventh victim.

A study by British space experts predicts the risk of spacecraft crashing into a growing storm of space debris in orbit will rise by 50 percent in the next 10 years and by 250 percent by 2059 to more than 50,000 a week.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Washington does not accept the legitimacy of Israeli settlement activity in Palestine.