A massive public memorial for Michael Jackson is to take place Tuesday at the Staples Centre in downtown Los Angeles, his concert promoter Randy Phillips said Thursday.

Jeanne LaCroix gazed with a wistful smile at the images unspooling across two giant screens inside downtown Los Angeles' Grammy Museum: a teenage Michael Jackson surrounded by his brothers as they announced the name of a winner at the 1974 Grammy Awards ceremony.

A 30-second snippet of Michael Jackson rehearsing two days before his death was released Thursday, part of more than 100 hours of footage that could be turned into live albums, a movie and a pay-per-view special, the promoter said.

Angelina Jolie was Hollywood's top-earning actress over the last year, earning an estimated US$27 million between June 2008 and June 2009, according to Forbes annual Celebrity 100 list released Thursday.

The restoration of Michelangelo's frescoes in the Vatican's Pauline Chapel may have produced a special prize — a previously unknown self-portrait of the artist.

Shi Pei Pu, a Chinese operatic soprano who along with his French lover was convicted of espionage and whose complicated affair inspired the Tony Award-winning Broadway play “M. Butterfly” and movie of the same title, died June 30 in Paris.

Eight years after the quick U.S. victory over Afghanistan's then-ruling Taliban, that country is still one of the biggest foreign headaches for the U.S., so much so that it is increasing its forces in Afghanistan by over 20,000 this year.

Do Blackberry-wielding, number-crunching 21st century readers still have patience and perseverance enough to wade through a leviathan of a novel, over 1000 pages in length?

Richard Wolffe takes the reader deep inside Barack Obama's campaign, revealing with wit, clarity and compelling insights, how the candidate and his closest confidants dealt with the biggest crises in the election.

Detective Cassie Maddox is called to a murder case: A young woman found stabbed to death in a small town outside Dublin.