West Ham says it has signed Arsenal goalkeeper Manuel Almunia on a one-month emergency loan to replace the injured Robert Green.

The east London club, which is fourth in the second-tier League Championship, secured the services of the Spanish player after learning Green will be sidelined for six weeks with a knee injury.

Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, says there aren't many contemporary singers who could "lead" a band, and he partially blames shows like "American Idol" for it.

"A lot of the new people they choose on shows like 'American Idol' and things like that — I don't ever hear lead singers," he said. "They always seem to choose to pick people that are great singers, fabulous singers, but they've never got the voice that makes a great lead singer."

A Brazilian government agency says it wants a TV ad starring a lingerie-clad Gisele Bundchen to be taken off the air because it is sexist.

The Women's Rights Secretariat says in a Thursday statement that it has asked the National Advertising Council to suspend the ad.

The new artistic director of the Salzburg Festival has unusual plans — he wants most operas performed there to be new productions.

Alexander Pereira says revivals will be the exception at the famed festival under his leadership.

Over the past seven years, the developers at Starbreeze Studios have created video games based on a film franchise ("The Chronicles of Riddick") and a comic series ("The Darkness").

For the latest entry in its first-person shooter catalog, the independent Swedish gamemaker is turning to an unexpected source of inspiration: another video game.

Two weeks after Egypt's uprising swept aside Hosni Mubarak, the presidents of Iran and Syria stood side by side in Damascus in a blunt message to the Arab Spring: The Syrian regime can count on its allies in Tehran.

Seven months later — and after at least 2,700 deaths in Syria — Iran is tweaking its big brother role for Syrian President Bashar Assad. The Iranian leaders are now urging him to consider talks with protesters or risk heading down a path with few escape routes.

A gunman walked into a Catholic church and killed a pregnant woman Thursday, then committed suicide, but emergency crews performed a C-section on the woman inside the church and saved the baby, a police official said.

Another woman sitting near the victim was wounded by a stray bullet in the shooting, which occurred just before a Mass at St. Mary's Church in an upper-middle class neighborhood of Madrid, the National Police official said.

The African heads of state who converged on the capital of Equatorial Guinea this summer are used to life's finer things — yet even they were impressed.

The minuscule nation located on the coast of Central Africa spent several times its yearly education budget to build a new $800 million resort in which to house the presidents attending this summer's African Union summit.

Pfizer Inc. and a pharmacy standards group are teaming to warn U.S. consumers about the risks of counterfeit prescription medicines, which endanger the public and take money from both pharmacies and legitimate drugmakers.

Pfizer Inc., whose impotence pill Viagra is widely counterfeited, and the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy on Thursday announced the start of an educational campaign to explain the dangers of counterfeit drugs and help people find legitimate pharmacies online.

A new government report looking into smoking by occupation says construction workers, miners and food service workers smoke the most. Experts say that may have as much to do with education levels as the jobs themselves.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found 19.6 percent of working adults smoke, but as many as 30 percent in the mining, construction and food service industries smoke.