The World

THURSDAY

Masked gunmen killed three men and wounded eight others when they opened fire on an illegal cockfighting ring behind a remote farmhouse about 20 miles northeast of McAllen, Texas, creating what Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino called “the crime scene from hell.”

A study by the independent Commonwealth Fund found one in four working-age Americans, about 48 million people, went without insurance at some point in 2011, often as a result of unemployment and other job changes.

Homeless Clifford W. Eagle, 53, walked up to a policeman in Montana and confessed to involvement in the murder of an Oklahoma county commissioner 25 years ago.

FRIDAY

Three more members of the U.S. Secret Service resigned in the wake of the Colombian prostitution scandal, bringing to six the number that have left the agency in the last week.

The Air Force Two plane carrying Vice President Joe Biden was struck by birds in California, but landed without problem and the vice president, passengers and crew were safe at all times.

Santos Carrera-Morales, 22, a convicted double-murderer who escaped from a central Kansas county jail with three other convicts was recaptured. Another was captured shortly after the escape and a third jailbird turned himself in at a Wal-Mart in North Platte, Nebraska.

WEEKEND

Wilson!!! A soccer ball washed onto the shore of a remote Alaska island, likely the first salvageable debris from last year’s Japanese tsunami that could be returned to its owner. The ball bears writing that identifies its place of origin.

Possibly evidence of a legendary hole-in-one, a 37-foot adult male gray whale washed up dead on Camano Island with a golf ball in his stomach. Scientists don’t know what killed the animal.

Two men were arrested on suspicion of setting a couple of crude but potentially deadly booby traps made from sharpened sticks and rocks along a popular Utah hiking trail. A spike with a rock center was hung from a tree and set to swing toward any unsuspecting hiker if contact was made with its trip wire. The second device was a cluster of about six sharpened sticks protruding from the ground, just inside an entrance to the shelter.

Chicago White Sox pitcher Phillip Humber threw the 21st perfect game in Major League Baseball history in a 4-0 win over the Seattle Mariners Saturday at Safeco Field. The final out came when M’s shortstop Brendan Ryan was called for a check-swing third strike on an outside slider.

MONDAY

Russian scientists released footage of what’s believed to be the world’s only all-white adult male orca, which belongs to a small pod known to inhabit waters off Russia’s Commander Islands in the Bering Sea. The orca was named “Iceberg” because of the way its towering white dorsal fin broke the surface of the chilly waters east of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Swiss scientists unveiled a robot that can be controlled using brain signals alone.

Two New Jersey state troopers have been suspended without pay in connection with accusations that police escorted a high-speed caravan of unmarked sports cars down the state’s Garden State Parkway.

TUESDAY

The U.S. Justice Department arrested BP engineer Kurt Mix for intentionally deleting more than 300 text messages that said the company’s efforts to control the Gulf of Mexico oil spill were failing. It is the first criminal charges to stem from the Deepwater Horizon explosion and leak that happened two years earlier.

Two more U.S. Secret Service agents resigned over the Colombian prostitution scandal, as President Barack Obama defended the agency that protects him by saying a “couple of knuckleheads” should not discredit the entire agency.

Deborah Stevens was fired from her job at a Long Island car dealership for an extended absence brought about by complications from a surgery to donate a kidney to her boss.

A woman collapsed into unconsciousness at the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas while eating a “double bypass burger,” drinking a margarita and smoking a cigarette.

WEDNESDAY

A utility company in Kyrgyzstan turned off the gas supply that kept an “eternal flame” war memorial burning after the city failed to pay its $9,400 bill.

Rupert Murdoch appeared before a UK inquiry into the power he wields over politicians and police and how far it resulted in a culture where phones could be hacked by his journalists and rules routinely broken.

Compiled by Gazette staff from a variety

of sources.