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In a classroom across from the coal mine exhibit at the Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, students are huddled around tables, studying petri dishes of bacteria.

But these aren't school-age kids — these students are all teachers, responsible for imparting science to upper-elementary or middle-school students.

That's a job that many here — and many teachers in grammar schools around the country — feel unprepared for.

For more than 40 minutes as their ship foundered last Wednesday, crew members of the South Korean ferry Sewol spoke with local maritime traffic services about a possible rescue. The conversation centered on getting help to the ship and on getting its passengers off the ferry, according to a transcript released Sunday.

At Monday's Boston Marathon, many runners will be on the course to honor the 16 people who lost limbs in last year's bombing. One married couple was among them: Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes.

Among many dark stories of that day, theirs is among the darkest. They were newlyweds of just seven months when each had their left leg blown off. Their injuries were so severe that they were some of the last victims to leave the hospital.

Tens of thousands of people are attending the Cannabis Cup in Denver this weekend, the first time the marijuana festival and trade show is held in Colorado since the state legalized recreational pot in January.

At St. Elie Armenian Catholic Church in downtown Beirut, Zarmig Hovsepian lit three candles and slowly mouthed silent prayers before Easter Mass. After reciting "Our Father," she added a prayer of her own: "For peace, for Lebanon and the region," she said, underscoring the deep sense of apprehension beneath the surface of otherwise festive Easter celebrations.

Easter Sunday is a busy time for many Christian churches. And for one Florida church, "busy" only begins to describe it. The Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe has no permanent members, but it will host tens of thousands of worshipers today.

That's because the church is across the street from Walt Disney World. The main basilica was built in the early 1990s, to give visitors to the resort complex a place to worship. As its website clarifies, Mary, Queen of the Universe Shrine is not a parish church.

Nearly a decade has passed since the doors of the Saint Frances Cabrini Catholic Church were shut and its holy water dried up.

With the Archdiocese of Boston strapped for cash, it was one of dozens of churches in the area to be closed and sold off. At the time, the archdiocese was in the throes of the clergy sex abuse crisis. It had agreed to pay nearly $85 million to more than 500 people who said they were abused by priests.

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the former boxing champion whose conviction for a triple murder was overturned after he served nearly 20 years in prison, has died of prostate cancer. Carter, whose story inspired a Bob Dylan song and a Denzel Washington film, was 76.

Carter was a contender for the middleweight boxing crown in the 1960s, but his life and career were derailed when he and another man were convicted of three murders that took place at a bar in Paterson, N.J., in 1966.

What a week it's been for giant pandas. We know because for the past seven days, we have been Google Frecking for pandas.

Google Frecking is an info-gathering game we devised — at the suggestion of our creative editor — for drilling a little deeper into a subject that intrigues us. In this case: pandas.

Last weekend we set up a Google Alert for pandas. We directed Google to send us news about pandas "when it happens" and we asked for "all results."

A shootout at a checkpoint killed at least two people in eastern Ukraine Sunday, according to multiple reports. The violence comes on the heels of an agreement between Ukraine, Russia and the West that calls for armed groups to disband; that pact led officials to announce a truce for this Easter weekend.