• Merlin Halverson, a district fire chief in Snohomish County, Wash., said an 80-year-old woman ran to a bedroom closet, got a gun and fatally shot a man who had broken into her home and stabbed her husband, 75.
• Gen. Lori Robinson was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as commander of the Air Force's U.S. Northern Command in charge of preventing foreign attacks, making her the first female officer to lead one of the military's war-fighting commands.
• Wayne Simmons, 62, of Annapolis, Md., a former national-security contributor to Fox News, admitted in federal court to defrauding the government of $78,000 by lying about his credentials but still claims he had a 27-year covert career with the CIA.
• Arnaud Marsollier, spokesman for the atomic particle research agency known as CERN, said the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva was briefly disabled when a weasel got into a transformer, killing the animal and cutting power to the world's largest atom smasher.
• Tracy Dove got a surprise phone call from a Mobile, Ala., veterinary clinic saying a microchip ID had been found in an elderly German short-haired pointer that turned out to be her dog Charlie, missing from his pen in her yard since 2006 when he was a year old.
• Erika Mantz, spokesman for the University of New Hampshire in Durham, said the university spent too much money on a custom-made chef's table with LED lights that, at $17,570, cost nearly as much as what an in-state student would pay in tuition and fees.
• Rachel Pine, a concert musician, got an apology from American Airlines after a flight crew prevented her from taking her 1742 Guarneri violin as a carry-on item for a flight from Chicago to Albuquerque, N.M., forcing her to rebook her flight to the next day.
• Ana Navarro, director of the Archaeological Museum in Seville, Spain, said 1,300 pounds of Roman silver and bronze coins in 19 jars dating from the fourth century, unearthed by workers laying pipe, bear images of the emperors Constantine and Maximian.
• Billy Beasley, a state senator from Clayton, Ala., finally succeeded in his multiyear quest to have the Alabama Legislature designate the lane cake -- a layered confection made with pecans, flaked coconut and sometimes a splash of bourbon -- as the official state cake.
A Section on 04/30/2016