The world 4/21/11

THURSDAY

Brain scans of healthy people showed signs that the brain was shrinking in Alzheimer’s-affected areas nearly a decade before the disease was diagnosed.

A U.S. jury convicted Barry Bonds of one count of obstructing justice but deadlocked on other charges that baseball’s home run king lied to a grand jury about whether he knowingly used steroids.

ABC television announced it was canceling its long-running daytime soap operas “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.” The two shows have been on the air for a combined 67 years.

FRIDAY

After printing 3 billion copies of a new postage stamp bearing an image of the Statue of Liberty, the United States Postal Service were alerted by a collector the image is actually of the replica statue at Las Vegas casino, New York, New York.

Scientists found whale mating songs originate with Australian humpback whales and are picked up by other whales as the songs travel across oceans.

A Kansas woman faces a charge of harboring a vicious animal after her pet python grabbed onto her neck and would not let go until a police officer intervened.

WEEKEND

Rescuers on Saturday began efforts to rescue a miner trapped more than a mile below ground after Hecla Mining Company’s silver mine outside Wallace, Idaho, collapsed for unknown reasons.

Bulldozers razed the Sands Point, New York, mansion where F. Scott Fitzgerald partied and which some say inspired his classic 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby.”

Health officials in Japan are considering a plan to collect stem cells from workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in case they are accidentally exposed to high levels of radiation and need a transplant.

A fan from Connecticut paid $13,360 to win a charity auction of PEZ sweets dispensers in the likeness of Britain’s Prince William and his fiancee Kate Middleton ahead of this month’s royal wedding.

MONDAY

NASA divided up more than $269 million among several companies vying to build commercial spaceships to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

The mounted head of an endangered white rhinoceros and the stuffed remains of a highly endangered snow leopard, remnants of the fortune amassed and lost by Alaska real-estate titan Robert Kubick, have been auctioned off to pay some of his debts.

Kenya’s Geoffrey Mutai won the Boston Marathon in two hours three minutes and two seconds, the fastest time ever recorded over the grueling distance.

TUESDAY

Tens of thousands of job-seekers flooded McDonald’s across the country, as the burger chain went on a hiring binge to fill 50,000 jobs in 14,000 U.S. restaurants.

Three children were injured at a Houston elementary school when a gun fell out of a 6-year-old’s pocket and went off in the cafeteria. The handgun fell out as the boy was sitting, and a bullet grazed his leg. Two other children were injured, but authorities were unsure if it was from the shot or the ensuing chaos.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro, 84, resigned from the Communist Party’s central committee, formalizing a gradual retreat from spotlight that started in 2006.

A shootout between two German circus families competing over tent space left six people injured.

WEDNESDAY

Fadia Hamdi, the 36-year-old policewoman who was accused of hitting Mohamed Bouazizi in the face four months ago, said the slap never happened. The slap set off a chain reaction of popular anger against Arab police states that has since unseated two dictators and caused others to tremble.

A boat carrying 760 people, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa, arrived on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa from Libya.

A gunman on a motorcycle sprayed gunfire into a Yemeni anti-government protest camp at dawn in a coastal town, killing one as opposition patience wore thin in a transition of power standoff.

Compiled by Gazette staff from a variety of sources.