Hundreds of people have petitioned Saudi King Abdullah to allow women to get behind the wheel on the first anniversary of the Women2Drive campaign launched in June 2011.

The signatories, who numbered nearly 600 on Wednesday, are asking the king of the only country in the world that forbids women to drive to "encourage women who have obtained driving licenses from neighboring countries to begin driving whenever necessary."

U.S. diva Jennifer Lopez visited a children's hospital in Panama to which she has donated telemedicine equipment at the start of a series of South American concerts.

"As a mother, children are the most important thing for me," she said Tuesday at a hospital for poor children in the capital, where she was accompanied by her sister Lynda and Panamanian officials.

Tom Cruise was in Manhattan to collect an award, and, yes, promote a movie.

On Tuesday night, the actor received the fourth ever Friars Club Entertainment Icon Award. The evening was a toast, not a roast. Alec Baldwin hosted at the Waldorf-Astoria, where speakers included such former co-stars as Cuba Gooding Jr. and Kevin Pollak.

When Grammy Awards producers learned of Whitney Houston's death less than 24 hours before the live telecast, they scrapped parts of the script, added performances and puzzled over how best to honor the Grammy-winning singer who died unexpectedly at age 48.

Host LL Cool J said that addressing the Grammy audience at the Staples Center after Houston's death was "definitely the most challenging moment I've faced in my career."

London-based private members' club Soho House is to open its first Asian venture in Mumbai -- but the move comes amid fears that overzealous "moral policing" is destroying the Indian city's nightlife.

Announcing plans for five new branches worldwide, Soho House chief executive Nick Jones described Mumbai as the "obvious choice" for the exclusive arts and media club to launch its first subcontinent venue next year.

The French artist Georges Mathieu, who from the 1940s pioneered the movement known as Lyrical Abstraction, has died aged 91, his family said Tuesday.

Georges Victor Mathieu d'Escaudoeuvres, who in the 1950s and 1960s was one of France's best known artists on the international scene, died Sunday in a hospital in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt.

Five years after being treated for breast cancer, "Good Morning America" co-host Robin Roberts has a new health fight on her hands.

Roberts said Monday she is beginning chemotherapy treatment for myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS, a blood and bone marrow disease once known as preleukemia. She is expected to get a bone marrow transplant sometime this fall.

"Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted" and "Prometheus" leapfrogged a fairy tale to take the top spots in the North American box office charts over the weekend, industry figures showed Monday.

The animated "Madagascar 3," the third installment in the wildly popular franchise starring Ben Stiller about escaped New York zoo animals, opened with a bigger-than-expected $60.3 million debut, according to Exhibitor Relations.

A new pan-Arab TV station that went on the air Monday courts viewers who see mainstream coverage of the political upheaval sweeping the Middle East as biased against the regimes in Syria and Iran and their close ally in Lebanon, the powerful Shiite militant group Hizbullah.

The Beirut-based station Al-Mayadeen, Arabic for The Squares, hopes to counter the influence of regional media heavyweights like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, both funded by oil-rich Sunni Gulf Arab countries that have backed the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad. It also promises to support the Palestinian cause and all forms of "resistance" — a term in Mideast parlance usually used to describe Hizbullah and other groups that fight Israel.

It's a good thing that J.R. Ewing only shot himself in a mirror in the final episode of "Dallas" back in 1991. Now he can rejoin the rest of the gang for a revival of the cult TV series.

Larry Hagman, 80, who portrayed the greedy Texas oil baron from the outset, stars in the freshly-minted episodes that will start going out Wednesday on the TNT cable television channel.