Queen Elizabeth Celebrates Perfect Day for Knights

--The gods bestowed a bright sunny day on Londoners Saturday--ideally suited for Queen Elizabeth II’s official birthday, which included a “trooping the color” military parade and a ceremony in which the queen conferred knighthood on 31 people, including British actor Rex Harrison and the queen’s official couturier, Hardy Amies. Although the queen’s birthday is April 21, the annual royal ceremony is traditionally held in the summer. “It is a very great honor and one which I am proud to accept,” Harrison said. The queen also gave Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking the title Companion of Honor. Hawking, 47, who is confined to a wheelchair with a neurological disease, is the author of the best-selling book “A Brief History of Time.”

--”We’ve definitely got to get concerned about spaceship Earth. It’s where we live . . . . We don’t need to go to Mars just yet.” Strange words from a former astronaut who helped lift the U.S. manned space program off the ground 30 years ago. But Wally Schirra says it’s time for countries to band together on a space station and satellites in a project called “Mission to Planet Earth.” Schirra was in Chapel Hill, N.C., over the weekend with four of the seven Mercury astronauts who marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the manned space program. Gathering at the University of North Carolina’s Morehead Planetarium, where the Mercury astronauts’ training began, were Scott Carpenter, Donald (Deke) Slayton, Gordon Cooper and Alan B. Shepard Jr.

--Bicyclists Matt DeWaal and Jay Aldous of Salt Lake City are first-class trailblazers. They’ve just pedaled themselves into the record books, becoming the first cyclists to traverse the original Pony Express trail in 10 days, just as the pony riders had to do 129 years ago. Starting from Sacramento, DeWaal and Aldous arrived in front of the Patee House Museum, headquarters of the 1860 Pony Express, in St. Joseph, Mo., after covering 1,938 miles. “I have great respect for the pony riders who rode month after month without so much as a hot shower,” DeWaal said.