Tom Cruise took time off from promoting his latest movie in Brazil by visiting Maracana Stadium and meeting former Brazilian football star Zico.
Cruise posed for photos at the stadium's newly installed pitch holding a Brazil jersey with his name on the back.

An entire troupe of performing fleas has fallen victim to the freezing temperatures currently gripping Germany.
Flea circus director Robert Birk says he was shocked to find all of his 300 fleas dead inside their transport box Wednesday morning.

"Glee" star Cory Monteith is heading to rehab, according to People.
Monteith's rep told the magazine that the actor has "voluntarily admitted himself to a treatment facility for substance addiction."

Beginning work a few years ago on her latest book, an anthology of poems for young people, Caroline Kennedy found herself looking through one of her mother's scrapbooks. She burst into laughter, she says, as she came across a poem that her brother John, as a youngster, had picked out and copied as a gift to their poetry-loving mom.
"Willie with a thirst for gore, Nailed his sister to the door," went the poem, by an unknown author. "Mother said with humor quaint, 'Careful, Willie, don't scratch the paint!'"

A federal judge says actress Angelina Jolie didn't steal the story for her movie "In the Land of Blood and Honey" from a Croatian author.
City News Service reports Friday's tentative ruling in Los Angeles will quash the lawsuit accusing Jolie of copyright infringement.

Cavalryman came from near the back of the field to win the $1 million Dubai Gold Cup by three lengths Saturday in a victory for owner and Dubai ruler Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum.
The Irish-bred horse Seismos jumped out to an early lead but was quickly passed by the Saddler's Rock. The John Oxx-trained horse was in front for much of the race.

Some 240,000 children have missed U.N.-backed vaccinations against polio because of security concerns in Pakistan's tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, a top official with the World Health Organization said Friday.
Dr. Nima Saeed Abid, the acting WHO chief in Pakistan, said health workers have not been able to immunize children in the North and South Waziristan regions — Taliban strongholds — since July 2012.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a first-of-its-kind diabetes drug from Johnson & Johnson that uses a new method to lower blood sugar — flushing it out in patients' urine.
The agency cleared J&J's Invokana tablets for adults with Type 2 diabetes. The once-a-day medication works by blocking the kidneys from reabsorbing sugar, which occurs at higher levels in patients with diabetes than in healthy patients. Regulators highlighted the drug as the first in a new class of medications that could help address the growing U.S. diabetes epidemic.

It's back.
The virtual reality headset, the gizmo that was supposed to seamlessly transport wearers to three-dimensional virtual worlds, has made a remarkable return at this year's Game Developers Conference, an annual gathering of video game makers in San Francisco.

Protests by the unemployed in southern Algeria are raising the specter of rising unrest in the country's sensitive oil regions, and are increasingly attracting the attention of al-Qaida.
Algeria's vast, sparsely populated Sahara only holds 10 percent of the country's population but it is home to this North African country's enormous oil and gas reserves — the basis of the entire economy and the source of the government's power. Those who live there claim they aren't benefiting from that wealth, and can't get jobs with the oil companies.
