The World - April 7, 2011

THURSDAY

An Egyptian cobra who escaped from the Bronx Zoo and became a star on Twitter last week was found by zoo officials. The cobra, though, claimed the official story is a cover up. The New York Yankees opened their season nearby, and the snake tweeted, “If you see a bag of peanuts inexplicably moving along the ground at Yankee Stadium today- just ignore it. It’s probably nothing.”

While walking on the beach near Kaliningrad in Russia, Daniil Korotkikh, 13, found a beer bottle containing a message written 24 years ago by German Frank Uesbeck, now 29. A Russian journalist tracked down Uesbeck and the note was returned.

Officials at the St.Laurence Anglican church in Wiltshire, central England, discovered a rare 400-year-old King James Bible that had been sitting on a ledge in the church for the past 150 years. Less than 200 original printings of the 1611 King James version are believed to exist.

FRIDAY

A dog that survived in a house swept away to sea three weeks ago by the devastating Japan tsunami was saved by a coast guard rescue team flying over an island of debris.

Several British tabloids reported the upcoming wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was called off as an April Fool’s joke. (Oh! Those wacky Brits.)

John Floyd Thomas Jr., a 74-year-old ex-insurance adjuster known as the “Westside Rapist” was sentenced to seven life terms in prison after pleading guilty to raping and killing seven women across the Los Angeles area.

A pair of pandas that arrived from China a few weeks ago made their first public appearance at a zoo in Tokyo. About 300 people who were forced from their homes by the tsunami joined thousands of others at Ueno Zoo to welcome male panda Ri Ri and female Shin Shin, both five years old.

WEEKEND

The operator of Japan’s quake-stricken nuclear plant said on Saturday it had found radioactive water leaking into the sea from a cracked concrete pit at its No. 2 reactor in Fukushima. The radiation in the pit measured 1,000 millisieverts per hour.

At least 10 people were killed and 83 wounded in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar as protests raged against the burning of a Koran by a radical fundamentalist Christian church in the United States.

A policeman was killed when a bomb exploded under his car in the Northern Irish town of Omagh Saturday, the first killing in the British-controlled province for two years.

Several dozen people including special forces soldiers swam and used boats to pull three rings of nets around a legendary giant turtle the size of a car door in Vietnam to give it medical treatment.

MONDAY

President Barack Obama launched his re-election campaign.

NASA delayed the launch of space shuttle Endeavour to April 29 because of a scheduling conflict at the International Space Station. The second-to-last mission for NASA’s shuttle program was pushed back because it would have arrived at the same time as a Russian cargo ship.

Obama agreed to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the September 11 attacks, in a military tribunal at Guantanamo and not in a civilian court as he had promised.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board ruled Tesoro had not adequately maintained a heat exchanger at its Anacortes refinery that exploded on April 2, 2010, causing the death of seven workers.

U.N. and French helicopters attacked Laurent Gbagbo’s last strongholds in Abidjan as forces loyal to Ivory Coast presidential claimant Alassane Ouattara streamed into the city in a “final assault.”

TUESDAY

The Idaho House approved a measure that declares the state’s wolves a “disaster emergency,” akin to a flood or wildfire, and gives the governor broad powers to eliminate them.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent in far western Arizona was arrested after bundles of marijuana were found stashed in his patrol vehicle.

Trenton Ganey, 29, N.C., was sentenced to 60 months probation by a federal judge for scrawling his name on a 1,000-years-old petroglyph on a canyon wall along the Colorado River in Arizona. He took a rock and carved “TRENT” onto the petroglyph. The petroglyph is considered important to the cultural heritage of area Native Americans.

WEDNESDAY

More than 130 people were missing and at least 15 appeared dead after a boat carrying Eritrean and Somali refugees from Libya capsized south of Sicily.

The U.N. reported about 34,000 southern Sudanese have fled their homes after tribal clashes broke out over land, water and cattle in recent weeks.

Reality TV series Big Brother will return to screens in Britain this year after Channel 5 signed a two-year deal with the hit show’s production company Endemol UK. The show was ditched by Channel 4 last year amid falling ratings.