The World

THURSDAY

Legal analysis by the Congressional Research Service found Congress has the constitutional right to legislate permits for cross-border oil pipelines like TransCanada’s $7 billion Alberta-to-Texas Keystone XL, which was rejected last week by President Barack Obama and the State Department.

Exxon Mobil agreed to pay more than $2 million in penalties and cleanup costs to Montana for a pipeline rupture in July that spilled an estimated 1,500 barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River.

David Rubenstein, billionaire co-founder of Carlyle Group private equity company, is donating $7.5 million to restore the 555-foot Washington Monument, which has been closed since it was damaged by an earthquake in August.

Time experts deadlocked over whether to scrap “leap seconds” which are occasionally added to clocks to stop them running ahead of the sun.

FRIDAY

Texas Congressman Lamar Smith withdrew his Stop Online Piracy Act bill after it prompted dozens of web sites to go dark or run protest messages this week.

Its cameras barred from the bribery and racketeering trial of former Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, Cleveland television station WOIO has been depicting the sometimes-sleazy testimony about hookers and gambling with puppets.

A coast guard officer’s “Get back on board damn it!” order to Francesco Schettino, captain of the capsized Costa Concordia liner, is being printed on T-shirts that are selling like hotcakes in Italy.

WEEKEND

Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, the winningest coach in major college football history who was fired in November over a child sexual abuse scandal, died on Sunday of lung cancer. He was 85.

U.S. aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln sailed through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf without incident on Sunday, a day after Iran backed away from an earlier threat to take action if an American carrier returned to the strategic waterway.

The Greek government released a list of 4,000 of the country’s top tax dodgers, including a famous singer and a retired basketball star as part of its name-and-shame policy to force payment.

The L.A. coroner identified a severed head, hands and feet that were found in the hills below the famed Hollywood sign as 66-year-old Hervey Coronado Medellin. A mother and daughter who were walking dogs nearby stumbled upon Medellin’s head. Cause of death has not yet been determined.

Two guns believed seized from gangsters Bonnie and Clyde in 1933 after a deadly Missouri shootout with police sold for a combined $210,000 at an auction on Saturday in Kansas City.

MONDAY

Big Ben is tilting, while the U.K. parliament building is slipping into the River Thames, according to a commission from the British House of Commons.

Tracy Edwards, the 52-year-old man found by Milwaukee police half naked and partially handcuffed outside the apartment of notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, was sentenced to prison for involvement in a fight that led to the death of a homeless man. Edwards in 1991 led police to Dahmer’s apartment, where they found body parts in his refrigerator and scattered other human remains.

A 21-year-old Palestinian woman was freed by authorities from the bathroom her father had locked her in for the past decade. Her father regularly beat her with a baton and metal wires and let her out only in the dead of night so she could clean their house.

Republican Senator Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, was stopped at an airport for setting off an alarm and refusing a patdown.

“Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin, 69, called off plans to marry in the summer, saying she and her fiancee William ‘Willie’ Wilkerson had decided they had gone too far, too soon.

TUESDAY

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney released tax returns showing he will owe $6.2 million in taxes on income of $42.5 million for 2010 and 2011. Because most of his income came from investment profits, Romney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010 and 15.4 percent for 2011.

A coronal mass ejection - a big chunk of the Sun’s atmosphere - was hurled toward Earth at about 5 million miles an hour. It is the strongest geomagnetic storm in more than six years and affected airline routes, power grids and satellites.

Charles Dingle, 53, the man convicted of the crime that generated one of the most famous headlines in U.S. journalism: the New York Post’s “Headless body in topless bar,” was denied parole by New York state authorities

WEDNESDAY

The Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden in May rescued an American and a Dane after a shootout with Somali pirates holding them hostage.

Compiled by Gazette staff from a variety

of sources.