Former Chelsea striker Adrian Mutu has lost his appeal against a FIFA ruling that he must pay the English Premier League club 17 million euros ($25.3 million) in compensation for breach of contract. Mutu was sacked by Chelsea after he tested positive for cocaine in 2004 and given a seven-month worldwide ban from football. The Romanian international cost Chelsea 15 million euros the year before and after serving his ban he moved to Juventus and then Fiorentina in Serie A. ...

Iran's controversial president defended his government's relationship with the country's supreme leader on Friday, disputing charges of a political rift. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking to a gathering in Mashad in northern Iran, rejected claims by people who have attempted to cast the relationship between his government and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "as tainted," according to Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency. "They are ignorant of the fact that our relationship with the respected leader is far above the framework of politics and ...

Michael Jackson's brood will indeed be growing up Jackson, but not without the occasional visit from a familiar face. Debbie Rowe will officially return to the lives of her two birth children, according to a joint statement between Rowe's and Katherine Jackson's attorneys released early July 30. In lieu of a custody battle between Katherine Jackson and Rowe, the two sides reached an agreement. While Katherine Jackson will remain the guardian for the three children, who have been living ...

Joe Wasilewski drives along a narrow stretch of road through Florida's Everglades. The sun is setting, night is coming on quickly, and Wasilewski is on the prowl for snakes -- and one snake in particular. "The next 10 miles seem to be the hot spot for Burmese pythons," he said. Wasilewski is a state-sanctioned snake-hunter who regularly scours this area for the reptiles. The Everglades, known as the River of Grass, has the perfect space and climate for pythons ...

Aircraft manufacturer Airbus is ready to fund a third search of the Atlantic Ocean if a second search, now under way, fails to find debris from last month's Air France crash, the company said Friday. Airbus is discussing a payment of between 12 to 20 million euros ($17-28 million) to help pay for a third search, but it is still too early to settle on a figure, company spokesman Stefan Schaffrath said. "We are ready to give a significant share, ...

There comes a moment in almost every movie romance when words no longer suffice and the music must rise to the occasion. From the initial meet-cutes to the heated arguments and all those third-act sprints to win back the girl, a movie's soundtrack often does the heavy lifting, providing all the needed passion, heartache and poetry. The romantic comedy Days of Summer, with a soundtrack ranging from Wolfmother to Carla Bruni, hits all the right notes, with a ...

Comedy is hard; dying is easy. Any stand-up will tell you that. Let's have a hand, then, for Judd Apatow. Hollywood's most successful contemporary comedy producer isn't resting on his laurels but continues to push toward risky subject matter: male sexual insecurity in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," unwanted pregnancy in "Knocked Up" -- and now the big C. No, not cancer -- though Adam Sandler's superstar comedian George Simmons is stricken with an appropriately eccentric form of leukemia. No, this ...

Human rights groups in Nigeria are questioning how a fundamentalist Islamist sect leader died. Mohammed Yusuf was initially reported captured Thursday by the military, but was found dead after he was turned over to police. "We demand a full investigation into the circumstances of Mohammed Yusuf's murder," Shehu Sani, president of the Civil Rights Congress, said Friday. "Whether he was a militant leader or armed rebel, dying in police custody is not same as dying in armed combat." Yusuf's sect, ...

The United States successfully tested a sea-based component of its missile defense shield Thursday evening, intercepting a ballistic missile with a dummy warhead over the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said. The exercise was the 19th successful test in 23 attempts of the system -- known as the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Program -- since 2002. A target missile was fired from Hawaii about 5:40 p.m. (11:40 p.m. ET) and was tracked by Navy ships hundreds ...

About 40 minutes into Chris Christie's talk July 27 at the Bethel United Methodist Church in Pennsauken, N.J., he got the question. The Republican candidate for governor is a former U.S. Attorney who made his name prosecuting corrupt Garden State politicians — 140 of them in seven years. So it's not surprising that Christie can hardly go an hour these days without someone asking him about last week's dramatic arrests of 44 people — including three mayors, two state ...