The role of heavy pain-suppressant drugs in Michael Jackson's life — and possibly in his death — continues to come into focus ahead of Tuesday's planned memorial service, with new allegations, Friday, that the powerful anesthetic Diprivan had been found in the pop-star's home. Citing a single, unnamed law-enforcement source, the Associated Press made the Diprivan claim on Friday. Diprivan, also known as Propofol, is typically used in hospital operating theaters as an intravenous anesthetic. Watch TIME Video: Appreciating Michael ...

Michael Jackson's bizarre private life and change in appearance ended up eclipsing his musical achievements, according to the world's media. Jackson's, whose death from cardiac address Thursday has sparked an outpouring of grief from fans, life has been given a more measured summing up by news media. Britain's Guardian newspaper said "his bizarre life-style and personal notoriety eclipsed his talent and his numerous achievements." The Guardian said his fame, from the age of 11, "had such a damaging ...

What do you do when you've just hanged someone for murder, and then their "victim" pops up alive and healthy a few towns away? 1. Not the Marion type William Jackson Marion and Jack Cameron met at a Kansas boarding house in 1872. The two men became fast friends and traveling companions, using Cameron's team of horses to go from place-to-place to find work. Along their journey, the two made a brief stop in Beatrice, Nebraska to visit Marion's ...

There is hardly anything in U.S.-Arab relations that screams scandal louder than the torture pictures of Abu Ghraib: Naked hooded male bodies in the fetal position, piled up on top of each other in a pyramid shape, next to them U.S. soldiers in uniform smiling and giving two thumbs up. Naked males made to touch their genitals on camera, others beaten so hard that paramedics are at hand to treat their wounds in preparation for the next round of ...

Everyone has heard of the worm at the bottom of the bottle, but what customs officials in Miami found kicked that up a few notches. United States Customs and Border Protection officers conducting a routine inspection on Wednesday seized a cobra and other poisonous snakes in a bottle believed to be "snake wine." Customs officials said the snakes, mixed in a glass container containing some form of alcohol, were inside an express mail package from Thailand. Jose Castellano, ...

The White House will unveil reforms to the nation's international tax code on Monday intended to close loopholes for overseas tax havens and end incentives for creating jobs overseas. Senior administration officials briefed reporters Sunday evening in a conference call ahead of the announcement that will be made by President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. The two components of the president's plan include reforms that ensure the tax code does not handicap companies seeking to create jobs at home, ...

Do not call Billy Bob Thornton an actor when you are interviewing him about his music. A Canadian radio host learned that lesson when Thornton and his electric hillbilly band -- The Boxmasters -- visited his Toronto, Canada, studio Wednesday morning. When Jian Ghomeshi introduced the trio on his CBC show, he noted that its singer-songwriter-drummer was also an "Oscar-winning screenwriter-actor-director." Thornton's publicist, Arnold Robinson, disputes suggestions that what followed was a breakdown by the actor -- hmmm, ...

This is how a submarine-launched ballistic missile works: once airborne, the 60-ton missile travels out of the earth's atmosphere into sub-orbit, where it moves toward its target at a shade under 4 miles a second. Approaching its destination, the tip of the missile splits into multiple, independently targeted warheads, each loaded with bombs up to 24 times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast, which re-enter the atmosphere in a spectacle that from the ground would resemble a meteor shower, before it resembled a thousand roaring suns. ...