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The US space agency's Opportunity rover has now clocked more miles on Mars than any man-made vehicle to reach another celestial body, NASA said. "Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance." Its next-generation robotic counterpart, the Curiosity rover, launched in 2012 and is tooling around near the Gale Crater on Mars.

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — No one knows for sure just how many people Patrick Sawyer came into contact with the day he boarded a flight in Liberia, had a stopover in Ghana, changed planes in Togo, and then arrived in Nigeria, where authorities say he died days later from Ebola, one of the deadliest diseases known to man.

A US judge gave the go-ahead for the $2 billion sale of the Los Angeles Clippers to former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, ruling that embattled owner Donald Sterling could not block the move. The ruling by California Superior Court Judge Michael Levanas on Monday came after a three-week trial pitting the 80-year-old Sterling -- barred from the National Basketball Association for life for making racist remarks -- against his estranged wife Shelly, who made the deal with Ballmer. Levanas said the sale could go forward immediately, even if Donald Sterling -- who had challenged his wife's authority to sell the NBA franchise -- appeals. Shelly Sterling negotiated the sale on behalf of the family trust, after Donald Sterling's position as co-trustee was terminated when two medical experts declared the billionaire real estate mogul mentally incompetent to handle trust affairs.