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• MOSCOW (AP) -- Kremlin officials like to insist Russian President Vladimir Putin does not care for big birthday bashes and said he was spending his 60th on Sunday quietly celebrating with close friends and family in his home city, St. Petersburg. However, the president's supporters didn't appear to receive the memo, and so the day saw an unprecedented exhibition of Putin-idolatry reminiscent of some of the world's oddest cults of personality.
• Much of it, like it the fawning, up-close-and-personal profile on Kremlin-friendly television channel NTV, looked like propaganda. Some of the praise was so extreme as to appear almost like a subtle form of satire on Putin's heroic representations in state media. And some Putin opponents used the occasion to poke fun.
• Here is a brief look at ways Putin's 60th birthday was marked:
• YOUTHS
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• PHOENIX (AP) -- The head of the U.S. Border Patrol agents' union says the agent killed last week in a shooting in southern Arizona apparently opened fire on two colleagues thinking they were armed smugglers and was killed when they returned fire.
• The two sets of agents approached an area where a sensor had been activated early Tuesday from different directions and encountered each other in an area of heavy brush, National Border Patrol Council president George McCubbin said.
• Agent Nicholas Ivie apparently opened fire first and wounded one of the other agents but was killed in the return fire.
• "I don't know what it was he saw or heard that triggered this whole event," McCubbin said. "Unfortunately it resulted in his death and another agent injured."
• Acting Cochise County Sheriff Rod Rothrock confirmed the scenario but would not say if Ivie was the first to shoot, saying that was up to the federal agencies involved.
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