L Aquila

Allergan Inc.'s acne drug Tazorac may help patients with the most common type of skin cancer, basal-cell carcinoma, early research shows. Twenty patients applied the topical gel to a total of 30 cancerous lesions on their faces and bodies once a day for up to eight months. The research, which didn't include a control group normally used in formal clinical trials, was detailed in a letter in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The shutters clicked and the cameras whirred as the world's top leaders landed in the Italian countryside and lighted up the earthquake-ravaged town of L'Aquila with the highest-wattage star power the place has ever seen. But the big buzz Wednesday didn't revolve around who showed up for this week's G-8 summit. It was about who hadn't.

More than a week ago, a scientist little known in earthquake circles made a bold prediction of a destructive earthquake in the Abruzzo region of central Italy based on spikes in radon gas. Giampaolo Giuliani went so far as to tell the mayor of a town there that it would strike within the next 24 hours. His deadline passed and for days, nothing happened. Then, early Monday, a magnitude-6.

Meeting for the first time, President Obama and Pope Benedict XVI sought common ground Friday on peace in the Middle East but struggled to bridge differences over abortion and stem-cell research -- divisive issues that have the White House battling with conservative and Catholic Americans back at home.

For the first time, physicists have confirmed that certain subatomic particles have mass and that they could account for a large proportion of matter in the universe, the so-called dark matter that astrophysicists know is there but that cannot be observed by conventional means. The finding concerns the behavior of neutrinos, ghost-like particles that travel at the speed of light. In the new experiment, physicists captured a muon neutrino in the process of transforming into a tau neutrino.

Bob Kravitz of the Rocky Mountain News writes that Denver "has some of the worst sports fans in America. . . . We like to think we're better than the folks back East. "At the very least, we'll accept that we're no worse than the fans in Boston and New York and even Chicago. But that's a convenient lie we tell ourselves. We are worse."

This post has been updated, as indicated below. The decision by Pope Benedict XVI to resign is a reminder of some colorful and controversial moments in Roman Catholic Church history. The last pope to resign was Gregory XII, who gave up the papacy reluctantly in 1415 to help end a dispute between rival popes known as the Great Western Schism. The competing claims to the papacy had riven the church for nearly four decades before Gregory stepped down, a second pope was excommunicated and the church elected a new pope.

Addressing leaders of the world's most important economies early Thursday, President Obama wasted no time in proclaiming a new day for U.S. policy on climate change. "I know that in the past, the United States has sometimes fallen short of meeting our responsibilities," he said. "So let me be clear: Those days are over."

R.D. Hubbard, Hollywood Park's chief executive officer, received a letter from a fan who was upset that the Inglewood track was ignoring tradition and moving its opening program from Wednesday to Friday night. The way Friday night turned out, don't look for any more Wednesday afternoon starts. "I wrote him back that we are changing the tradition," Hubbard said. An estimated 29,000 showed up to begin Hollywood Park's 56th season, nearly double the 14,559 opening-day crowd of last year.