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• Barring an unlikely reprieve, Mesa's purebreds will be turned into horse meat for export come July. They are victims of a wrenching economic downturn that has wiped out fortunes, turned housing developments into ghost towns and left more than a quarter of the population out of work.
• The Pura Raza Espanola breed has always been popular in Spain but took off just after the start of the country's biggest ever economic boom in the late 1990s. They had already won fame as war horses and gifts exchanged between European nobility, and have been featured in Hollywood films such as "Gladiator" and "Braveheart." The spike in demand over the last decade triggered a breeding frenzy in which the number of horses in Spain rose by the hundreds of thousands, nearly half of them purebreds like Pura Raza Espanola. Spain's newly minted affluent classes couldn't get enough of them.
• Then came the bust of Spain's property bubble in 2008. First demand for the horses dried up. Now, as the financial crisis deepens with no end in sight, there's a new dilemma: Horse owners are increasingly unable to pay for the animals' upkeep. It all means that they face slaughter if owners can't find anybody to take the animals off their hands. Until last year, Spanish law even dictated that rejected horses must be sent to the slaughterhouse. That's no longer the case but most still are turned into meat because there's little alternative if nobody else is willing to take the horses in. Owners who simply abandon horses face steep fines.
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• BOSTON (AP) -- A win for the Bruins would have been an uplifting end to the city's emotional return to major sports after the Boston Marathon bombing.
• Simply playing the game was good enough.
• A moving "Star-Spangled Banner," a touching slideshow of marathon scenes and a postgame, stick-raising salute to the capacity crowd by both teams made it a night to remember two days after a pair of deadly explosions at the city's revered race.
• "It was still positive in the way that we had an event and we had cheering and we had people out and about, having a good time," Boston's Andrew Ference said after Buffalo's 3-2 shootout win Wednesday night. "To get a win, we wanted it so bad. I think you still take the good from the night."
• The Bruins nearly got that win, but with just 26.6 second left in regulation, Cody Hodgson scored the Sabres' second power-play goal. And when Drew Stafford got

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