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If you want to eat like a queen, maybe it's time to break out the cold chicken, curry and cream sauce.

Queen Elizabeth II celebrated the 60th anniversary of her coronation in a ceremony Tuesday at Westminster Abbey. But the event also marks the anniversary of a dish as resilient as the British monarch herself: Coronation Chicken.

The recipe was invented as a solution to a conundrum of royal proportions: What to make – in advance – to serve 350 foreign dignitaries attending a banquet following the queen's coronation on June 2, 1953? Oh, and did we mention that Britain was still living under post-war food rations that made many ingredients hard to come by?

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Working jointly with the FBI, Microsoft says it has disrupted a botnet responsible for stealing more than $500 million from bank accounts worldwide.

In a blog post published late last night, Microsoft said this was its "most agressive botnet operation to date" and the "first time that law enforcement and the private sector have worked together" to "execute a civil seizure warrant as part of a botnet disruption operation."

In English, what happened here is that about 5 million computers worldwide were infected with a program that recorded the passwords of bank accounts online. The so-called Citadel botnet — one of the largest in the world — then sent the credentials to a network controlled by criminals. Using the passwords, they were able to take funds from the accounts.

According to Reuters, which broke the story, thieves were able to steal from dozens of banks including "American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, eBay's PayPal, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo."

What Microsoft and the FBI did was seize some servers central to the botnet, therefore disrupting communication with about 1,400 of those nodes.

Reuters explains:

"While the criminals remain at large and the authorities do not know the identities of any ringleaders, the internationally coordinated take-down dealt a significant blow to their cyber capabilities.

"'The bad guys will feel the punch in the gut,' said Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general counsel with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit."

One week after the S&P/Case-Shiller indices showed a 10.9 percent jump in U.S. home prices from March 2012 to March 2013 — the biggest year-over-year gain in that data since April 2006 — there's another report showing a similar jump in April.

CoreLogic, which collects data on real estate sales, says home prices were up 12.1 percent in April vs. April 2012. According to The Associated Press, it's the largest year-over-year increase in CoreLogic's data since February 2006.

Reuters notes that "prices have been gaining for over a year as the housing market turned a corner, helped by low interest rates, a pick up in sales and less available supply."

Economists watch home sales closely. They're a major indicator of consumer confidence. Also, when home sales rise, the ripple effects spread out through the economy as new owners buy furniture and appliances or put money into renovations and repairs.

One of the last things Alaska Gov. Walter Hickel did before he resigned to join the Nixon Cabinet was to fill a Senate vacancy caused by the December 1968 death of E.L. Bartlett, a Democrat. Hickel picked a GOP state representative by the name of Ted Stevens. Stevens, who only months before lost a Republican primary bid for a different seat, went on to serve more than 40 years in the Senate, longer than any Republican in history. Appointing Stevens was by any definition a good move.

Less successful was Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's opportunity some 40 years later to fill a Senate seat. With Barack Obama having been elected president, Blagojevich decided to offer the seat to the highest bidder. By doing so, he got himself impeached, removed from office, and sent to prison. It was also the beginning of the end for Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a rising star who ultimately was brought down thanks to his own greed and crashed to Earth (and served time as well).