It's been quite a day for media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch.

As you've heard on the news, Mr. Murdoch has spent much of today being grilled by a U.K. parliamentary committee about his knowledge of the phone hacking scandal, along with his son, James Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation.

Rupert Murdoch used his appearance to express regret for the practice of phone hacking - and also to reassert that he was unaware of it.

Here is an excerpt of Mr. Murdoch's testimony earlier today. He is being questioned by British Labour politician, Jim Sheridan.

Simon Hoggart is a columnist for the Guardian Newspaper. We reached him in London, England on his mobile phone.

Whenever I hear about the high cost of a medical degree, I tend to think about the personal sacrifice, the years spent in school, the sleepless nights on call.

But in Russia, it has a more straight-forward meaning.

Reports have surfaced in Russia that students who are aspiring to be doctors -- as well as dentists and surgeons -- are bribing their professors to score good marks.

Anna Nemtsova is one of the journalists who's been working on this story. She's a stringer for The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Moscow correspondent for Newsweek magazine. We reached her in the capital.

Genevieve Weber and her husband David have a four-month-old baby girl named Anabela. They also have a hefty speeding ticket issued to them on the day Anabela was born. And, now, David is going to lose his driver's licence.

But this is more complicated than your typical story about a father panicking and stepping on the pedal too hard on the way to the hospital. When Genevieve went into labour, the couple knew they had to get to the hospital in Brandon quickly. Genevieve had had complications with the birth of their first daughter, Madison, and she knew she needed to have a C-section to deliver Anabela.

To explain further, we reached Genevieve Weber at home in Bagot, Manitoba.

Dateline: Port Colborne, Ontario.For a brief time on Saturday night, it seemed certain: aliens from outer space had arrived in the sky over Port Colborne, on the shores of Lake Erie. Their purpose? Unclear. Their presence: clear as day. The lights from their intergalactic spacecraft shimmered boldly as they hovered in that spooky, unworldly way no earth-borne vessel could possibly maneuver. Were these signals of a friendly visitation, or the vanguard of an imminent invasion? Thanks to the vigilance of concerned citizens in the area, we'll never know. Several eyewitnesses called 9-1-1 to report the mysterious craft floating above the Sherkton Shores Resort.

Police and firefighters were dispatched to investigate. As they made their way to the resort, they were informed that a gentleman at a nearby campground -- or at least a being who presented itself as a gentleman -- had called to report witnessing what he thought was a hot air balloon, crashing into the lake.

A likely story. But after three-quarters-of-an-hour surveying the scene, and interviewing the caller, authorities concluded his likely story was in fact, actually pretty likely.

That's because the Sherkton Shores Resort was host to a wedding ceremony that very evening, in which revelers released a series of illuminated helium balloons into the air. Which seems to tie up all the loose ends of the mystery quite nicely.

Unless, of course, you consider the very distinct possibility that aliens capable of interplanetary travel would also be entirely capable of both warping time and warping the human mind in a way to cover their tracks.

It would've been the simplest thing in the world for beings with this kind of technology, once they realized they'd been detected, to go back in time and orchestrate earthling behaviour in such a way to ensure that a wedding would happen at the time and place of their discovery -- one that involved a perfect text-book decoy: helium balloons being launched in the air.

As I'm sure any highly-advanced alien species knows, people will believe anything, as long as they see it. After all, when you look up the definition for "gullible" in extra-terrestrial dictionaries, there's just a big picture of planet Earth.

Here's Texas Audio, with UFO.

It's one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world. And after eight of years of historic drought, things are about to get a whole lot worse in Somalia. Tomorrow it's expected that the UN will offically declare a famine in the country's southern regions.

This morning, former Irish President Mary Robinson travelled into Somalia from Kenya. She's visiting the Horn of Africa with the Irish aid group Trocraire and Oxfam Ireland. She was last in Somalia nearly two decades ago, when more than three-hundred-thousand people died as a result of the famine in the early nineties.

As she was crossing into Somalia, Mary Robinson spoke with Irish national public broadcaster R.T.E. Here's an excerpt of her reaction to the scene that greeted her, for the record.

And now, today's edition of Quote/Unquote.Every day, at the same time, for the past three years -- except when there's a blizzard -- Tony has boarded the Thomas Jefferson ferry from Manhattan to Weehawken, New Jersey. He's a quiet passenger. Keeps to himself. Only reason you'd even notice him is if you nearly step on him while he's eating crumbs off the floor.

He's not showy, but with his dedication to riding the ferry, Tony the pigeon -- I mentioned he was a pigeon, right? He's a pigeon. And with his dedication to riding the ferry, the quiet pigeon is warming hearts, and transforming attitudes. In the words of George Schumpp, senior deckhand on the Thomas Jefferson ferry, quote:

"I've been a New Yorker my whole life, and we're not big fans of pigeons -- but Tony has changed the way I think."

Unquote.

International disputes are pretty rare in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. But there's a fight on now.

At issue is a shipwreck poking up from the bottom of the bay. Locals say the wreck is a landmark and want it to stay where it is. But the ship first set sail as the Maud under the command of Roald Amundsen, Norway's famous polar explorer and a group of Norwegians would like to see her returned home.

Jan Wanggaard is the leader of Maud Returns Home. We reached him in Asker, a suburb of Oslo.

If you look it up, you'll find that Colombia is a significant producer of the world's bananas.

British Columbia, though, is not.

Which is what makes Melanie Benekritis' banana tree so special.

We reached Ms. Benekritis at her home in Surrey, B.C.

And now for the latest installment of Quote/Unquote.Here's a bittersweet yet teachable moment for all you kids out there: when life deals you lemons, make lemonade. But that's only half of it. Here's the rest: be prepared that in making that lemonade, life just may deal you more lemons. Allow me to illustrate with a recent real-life example, that involves actual lemonade, and figurative lemons, in the form of police officers.

The real lemonade was made by two sisters and a cousin in Midway, Georgia, who set up a stand outside their house. They had hoped to raise enough money to buy tickets to a nearby waterpark. But then the police showed up at their door and told them they would have to shut down their operation because they didn't have a business licence.

Responding to the seemingly harsh police action, Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar explained, quote: "We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance."

Unquote.

The high school science fair seems to have come a long way since I was a young-un. Back then, a well-kept ant farm or a fake mini-volcano would pretty much win you a scholarship to the university of your choice.

Nowadays, either of those projects would probably get you thrown out of the gym. Not that the cool science fairs even take place in gyms anymore -- they've migrated to the web.

And this year, the winner in the youngest division of the first-ever Google Science Fair is Lauren Hodge. She's fourteen. And we reached her in York, Pennsylvania.

Dateline: Los Angeles.It was one of those "where-were-you-when" moments; one of those events that will forever be seared in the memories of Californians: the weekend Carmageddon was declared on their state -- and then failed to amount to anything that deserved the suffix "-mageddon".

The closure of sections of Highway four-oh-five in California was expected to lead to traffic chaos. And though that chaos failed to materialize, at least one big lesson was learned in the exercise. A lesson involving bicycles and airplanes.

To help Californians avoid the anticipated traffic stand-still, the low-cost airline, Jet Blue, offered four-dollar tickets to fly from Bob Hope Airport in Burbank to Long Beach. That's a flight path of roughly sixty kilometers.

Also traveling from Burbank to Long Beach were six cyclists. Their trip was free, and their goal was to race the Jet Blue jet to the finish line.

I would have assumed the airplane had the advantage, what with the jet engines and all. But I would be wrong. The cyclists won.

The guys on bikes finished their trip in an hour-and-a-half. The Jet Blue flight arrived an hour later. The flight was supposed to take twenty minutes -- but with security and runway delays, the air journey took slightly longer than scheduled.

So we learned that cycling is a faster, greener, healthier way to travel in California. And we also learned to never, ever, ever again name any upcoming event with the "mageddon" suffix. Except for this race, which, for the plane, could only be termed "Air-mageddon".