The death of Davy Jones should give us pause to remember that the Monkees were one of the great groups of the 1960s...

Artist Simon Beck must really love the cold weather. Along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France, he spends days plodding through the snow in raquettes (snowshoes), creating these sensational patterns of snow art. Working for 5-9 hours a day, each final piece is typically the size of three soccer fields! The geometric forms range in mathematical patterns and shapes that create stunning, sometimes 3D, designs when viewed from higher levels...

Five months after surviving a horrifying goring, Juan José Padilla, one of Spain’s leading bullfighters, wears a patch over his left eye and cannot chew any food, even after a series of surgeries to reconstruct part of his face. But his recovery is startling for a man who was last seen in images shown around the world stumbling out of a bullring, holding his bloodied face and screaming, “I can’t see!” as his shocked fans looked on...

The first time Michele arrived at the Maple Street homeless shelter three years ago, she was still driving her BMW 325xi, the final remnant of her Silicon Valley affluence.

Her paper wealth of more than $2 million had evaporated a decade earlier, she says, via a stock options fiasco. She had used the options to buy stock in her high-flying software startup, netting a seven-figure profit by the government's reckoning, but then held the shares until they were nearly worthless. That left her with no cash and a $200,000 tax bill. She had sold nearly everything to cover it: her house, her remaining stocks, her art collection...

The Free Syrian Army announced Thursday that it was retreating from the shattered Bab Amr neighborhood in the Syrian city of Homs, citing concerns for the welfare of civilians and the inability to withstand an escalating offensive by better-armed government troops.

The rebels’ decision came a day after Syria’s army launched a fresh push to retake Bab Amr, which had become a powerful symbol of resistance to the regime led by President Bashar al-Assad. The district has been under siege by government troops, bombarded on a daily basis for nearly four weeks...

Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger and activist who became well known for publishing undercover videos and revealing photographs aimed at liberals and Democrats, died Thursday. He was 43. Among Mr. Breitbart’s targets was a New York congressman, Anthony Weiner, who ultimately resigned over explicit photographs he sent to women via Twitter and Facebook that were published on Mr. Breitbart’s Web site...

From Valley Girls to the Kardashians, young women have long been mocked for the way they talk.

Whether it be uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions? Like this?), creating slang words like “bitchin’ ” and “ridic,” or the incessant use of “like” as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or even stupidity.

Right?

President Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religious freedom makes Rick Santorum “throw up.” “What kind of country do we live in that says only people of nonfaith can come into the public square and make their case?” Santorum says. It’s a central part of his campaign strategy to distort such things as a Kennedy speech, or an Obama speech, to whip up outrage at the supposed war on religious people in America. Here’s what Kennedy said:...

The interesting thing about music therapy is that nobody I could find understands how it works on the brain -- just that it does. The subject is newsworthy right now because former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was badly injured in a Tucson, Ariz., shooting a year ago, apparently recovered her speech though music...

In an unprecedented collaboration between Anonymous and WikiLeaks, the secret spilling site began leaking Sunday night portions of a massive trove of e-mails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor that Anonymous obtained by hacking the company in December.

WikiLeaks did not mention the source of the reported five gigabytes of e-mails in its press release, but did say it has been working for months with 25 media outlets from around the world to analyze the documents...