* The president of Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, fled from his nation's capital city, Bishkek, after a day of bloody protests that left 68 people dead and more than 400 people wounded. A transitional government, led by a former foreign minister, announced that it had seized power, had dissolved the country's Parliament, and would remain in place for six months. Some worried that the political chaos would affect the nearby Manas U.S. air base, which is being used to support NATO actions in Afghanistan, but a Kyrgyz official later said that supplies were still reaching the base. Protesters and new temporary government officials have said that the country's government has been corrupt and brutal, and many were outraged by a new spike in utility prices.
* The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, has said that the Catholic Church in Ireland is "losing all credibility" over its handling of the Church's sex-abuse crisis. In a BBC radio interview, Williams said: "I was speaking to an Irish friend recently who said that it’s quite difficult in some parts of Ireland to go down the street wearing a clerical collar now. And an institution so deeply bound into the life of a society suddenly becoming, suddenly losing all credibility — that’s not just a problem for the church, it’s a problem for everybody in Ireland.”
* Shane Dawson has been described by The New York Times as "YouTube's comic for the under-30 set." A thread called "Why hasn't ShaneDawsonTV been suspended?" is the eighth most popular comment thread in YouTube's "Creator's Corner" forum. Yet many people older than 30 have never heard of the enfant terrible. Robert J. Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, noted that only in today’s niche-driven world could an artist attract millions of followers and still stay off the mainstream radar. “He’s kind of a cross between Ernie Kovacs and the most potty-mouthed kid in the eighth grade,” Dr. Thompson said. “This isn’t something that you’d watch as your only form of entertainment. But when you’re sitting around, looking at videos and sending them to other people, I guess he is developing this new, comic style that is unique to the Internet.”
* The Large Hadron Collider, "the world's biggest physics machine" (The New York Times), began making subatomic particles collide near Geneva at the end of March, after 16 years and $10 billion worth of intellectual and financial investment. In the control rooms at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, scientists toasted and clinked champagne glasses. From The New York Times: "Particle colliders get their oomph from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy — denoted in the physicists’ currency of choice, electron volts — that these machines can pack into their little fireballs, the farther back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang, and the smaller and smaller are the things they can see. The first modern accelerator was the cyclotron, built by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1930s. An early version was a foot in diameter and accelerated protons to energies of 1.25 million electron volts. Over the last century, universities and then nations leapfrogged each other, building bigger machines to peer deeper into the origins of the universe. But the race ended in 1993, when Congress canceled the Superconducting Supercollider, a 54-mile, 20 trillion-electron-volt machine being built underneath Waxahachie, Texas, after its projected cost ballooned to $11 billion. The following year, CERN approved its own big collider."
* From an article in the Travel section of The New York Times: "Mauritius, long called the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, has for decades been one of the planet’s most elite island getaways. An officially English-speaking former Dutch, French and British colony, it is Africa’s farthest-flung nation, a speck of volcanic rock with a few smaller offshore islands and shoals, more than 1,200 miles east of the African mainland. Starting in the late 20th century, that remoteness, combined with its natural gifts, attracted jet-setters and the five-star resorts catering to them. Prince William of Britain, Princess Stephanie of Monaco, J. K. Rowling and Robert De Niro have all been spotted in Mauritius in recent years. Airport authorities amped up the island’s perceived cachet by basically putting velvet ropes around the runways. Only Air Mauritius and established national carriers like British Airways and Air France were allowed in, a policy that restricted access and kept ticket prices exaggeratedly high, helping to preserve Mauritius as a refuge for the rich."