The World

THURSDAY

“Whatever” was deemed the most irritating word for the third year in a row in Marist College’s annual survey of Americans, with four in ten adults calling it the most annoying verbal conversation filler. One in five had similar disdain for “like” and ‘you know.”

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was found by the U.S. Justice Department to have violated U.S. civil rights laws by engaging in racial profiling of Latinos and making unlawful arrests in illegal immigrant crackdowns.

Mark Meckler, 49, co-founder of the conservative Tea Party Patriots group, was arrested at LaGuardia airport for unlawful gun possession. He has a California permit to carry the gun but not a New York state permit.

Jewish settlers set fire to a Palestinian mosque in the West Bank after Israeli forces tore down structures in a settler outpost built without government approval.

FRIDAY

Daniel Ruettiger, the legendary Notre Dame football underdog who inspired the 1993 movie “Rudy,” was charged with a stock scam associated with Rudy Nutrition - a company Ruettiger founded to try to compete against Gatorade in the sports drink market.

A soon-to-open Cleveland casino was bombarded with job applications from 16,000 people in four days after announcing openings for 750 positions.

An adulterated batch of bootleg liquor killed at least 125 drinkers in eastern India, with dozens more arriving at a cramped rural hospital with poisoning symptoms.

WEEKEND

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il died of a heart attack on a train. His son, Kim Jong-un, the “Great Successor,” was promoted from general to leader of the reclusive nuclear state Monday.

The last convoy of U.S. soldiers pulled out of Iraq on Sunday, ending nearly nine years of war that cost almost 4,500 American and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives.

A boat carrying illegal immigrants from Iran and Afghanistan, heading for Australia, sank off the coast of east Java in Indonesia and more than 300 people were missing with many feared dead.

Frito-Lay truck driver David Dopp won a lime-green, 631-hp Lamborghini Murcielago LP-640, worth at least $200,000 in a Utah convenience store’s contest Saturday. He was found a few hours later upside down in the car 75-feet off a rural road near his home. Authorities say he was doing about 50 mph on a 35 mph road when he hit a patch of black ice.

An elderly woman was doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death in an NYC elevator Sunday. Jerome Isaac, an occasional employee of the deceased Deloris Gillespie, told police the woman owed him $2,000. He was charged the next day with murder and arson.

MONDAY

Russia announced it had successfully tested a short-range interceptor missile nicknamed “Satan” as part of its ongoing effort to develop a domestic missile defense system.

The National Zoo was given $4.5 million by David M. Rubenstein, founder and managing director of The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, to fund its giant panda program, which faces a lack of cubs produced by its two adults, the zoo said.

TUESDAY

White supremacist and former soldier Kevin Harpham, 37, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Spokane to 32 years in prison for planting a shrapnel bomb along the parade route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration.

Twenty-two-year-old Russian heiress Ekaterina Rybolovleva has purchased an $88 million apartment in New York City. The apartment, which Rybolovleva will use for visits to NYC while attending college at an undisclosed university elsewhere, is the highest individual financial transaction in the history of NYC.

The origin of some of Stonehenge’s most-famous rock formations has allegedly been discovered by the National Museum Wales and Leicester University in a site 100 miles from Stonehenge, named Craig Rhos-y-felin. Researchers compared the mineral content of rocks at Stonehenge to those at Craig and found an almost 99 percent match of mineral composition between the two sites.

The U.S. House of Representatives bypassed a vote on a Senate-approved plan to extend the current payroll tax cut, which affects 160 million Americans, through February.

A 76-year-old British woman had a pen removed from her stomach, and doctors were shocked to discover that after 25 years the pen still works.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope found two new planets orbiting a distant sun-like star, and the researchers who made the find say these two are the size of Earth or smaller. That’s a first in the search for extraterrestrial life. The two newly-found planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are about 950 light-years away.

WEDNESDAY

Residents of Mayan Mexico began a year long countdown to the end of the world, one year before the mysterious doomsday date suggested by ancient Mayan calendars.

Trent Arsenault, a 36-year-old San Francisco bachelor and engineer, was ordered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to stop selling his sperm on the Internet. Arsenault has fathered an estimated 14 children through free donations of his semen.

Compiled by Gazette staff

from a variety of sources.