Posted: 5:44 PM Mariela Castro, a married mother of three and member of Cuba's most powerful family, has paved her own way in making gay rights her life's cause.

Posted: 5:42 PM Days after four people died amid a traffic jam of climbers scrambling to conquer Mount Everest, Nepal officials said a similar rush up the world's tallest peak will begin soon, and there's little they can do to control it.

Posted: 5:40 PM The leaders of the 27 countries that make up the European Union are to meet in Brussels Wednesday to try and find a way to keep the debt crisis in Europe from spiraling out of control and promote jobs and growth.

Posted: 6:42 AM More than a third of the malaria-fighting drugs tested over the past decade in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa were either fake or bad quality, seriously undermining efforts to fight the disease, a study said Tuesday.

Posted: 5:24 AM prominent Palestinian writer who was jailed in Syria for nearly three weeks described the facilities as "human slaughterhouses," saying security agents beat detainees with batons, crammed them into stinking cells and tied them to beds at night.

Posted: 5:36 PM A former Boston University student who was ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs on the Internet says he will continue fighting the penalty.

Posted: 4:16 AM From a park near Albuquerque, to the top of Japan's Mount Fuji, to the California coast the effect was dramatic: The moon nearly blotting out the sun creating a blazing "ring of fire."

Updated: 5:57 AM Robin Gibb, a founding member of the Bee Gees who helped propel the group to international stardom, has died. He was 62.

Posted: 6:07 PM A magnitude-6.0 earthquake shook several small towns in northeast Italy Sunday, killing four people, knocking down a clock tower and other centuries-old buildings and causing millions in losses to the region known for making Parmesan cheese.

Posted: 10:57 AM Police in the Canadian province of Ontario say they are holding a man who allegedly swallowed a $20,000 diamond as long as it takes for him to produce the evidence.

Posted: 4:32 PM In his first interview since December, Syrian President Bashar Assad insisted Tuesday his regime is fighting back against foreign mercenaries who want to overthrow him.

Posted: 4:30 PM The political uncertainty is worrying Greece's international creditors as well as Greeks themselves, who have withdrawn hundreds of millions of euros from banks since the May 6 election.

Posted: 4:28 PM Convicted war criminal and former Liberian President Charles Taylor said during his sentencing hearing Wednesday that he sympathizes with victims of the civil war in Sierra Leone he helped foment.

Posted: 4:24 PM Hobbled by strokes and wearing a business suit instead of combat fatigues, the frail, 70-year-old defendant had an angry exchange of hand gestures with the families of massacre victims in the public gallery.

Posted: 4:21 PM Government troops and warplanes pounded al-Qaida positions in southern Yemen on Wednesday, killing at least 29 militants as part of a ramped up campaign against the group, military officials said.

Posted: 4:19 PM A black smoke covered Cairo's Tahrir Square. Around a dozen protesters who had been holding a weekslong sit-in demanding an end to military rule had come to the conclusion their gathering was useless

Posted: 4:15 PM Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad replaced almost half of his West Bank-based Cabinet on Wednesday, a clear sign that efforts to end the Palestinian political split are stuck.

Posted: 4:13 PM Brazil's geographical service says on its website that the Rio Negro crested at 97.70 feet Wednesday in the jungle city of Manaus. That's just above the previous record set in 2009, when the river hit 97.67 feet

Posted: 4:11 PM A police report seen by The Associated Press says the man was bleeding from an arm when a taxi driver picked him up in the area of Tuesday's blast.

Posted: 1:04 PM Obama signed an executive order allowing the Treasury Department to freeze U.S.-based assets of those who the White House says "threaten the peace, security and stability" of Yemen.

Posted: 4:18 AM Twenty years after the opening shots of the Bosnian War, former Bosnian Serb military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic went on trial Wednesday at a UN tribunal on 11 charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Posted: 4:14 AM The negotiating stance from Iranian officials never varies: The Islamic Republic will not give up its capabilities to make nuclear fuel. But in the messages are meanings beyond Tehran's talks with world powers.

Posted: 4:07 AM Indonesian special forces have found the cockpit voice recorder from a Russian passenger jet that smashed into the side of a volcano, killing 45 people.

Posted: 12:32 PM The central U.S. role in the operation would be a significant stepping up of American-Yemeni cooperation against al Qaeda's branch here, which is accused of a string of attempted attacks against the United States.

Posted: 12:15 PM The May 6 election left no party with enough votes for a majority in parliament and repeated efforts over nine days to cobble together a coalition government proved fruitless.