Few people would have pegged Marie-Laure Picat as a likely heroine. The portly, plain-looking 37-year-old lived quietly in a village in central France, shunned attention, and said her only real quirk was an adoration of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. But on Aug. 10, when it was revealed that Picat had died the previous day, most of France spared a thought — and shed a tear — for the mother who spent what she knew would be the last ...

Michael Jackson's autopsy is done, but its release is on hold, as is the court case over the iconic singer's estate. The autopsy results will not be released indefinitely because of the ongoing investigation into the singer's death, according to authorities. The Los Angeles coroner's office said Monday that it would abide by a request from the police department to keep Jackson's cause and manner of death confidential. Investigators are trying to determine whether anyone should be charged in Jackson's ...

Canada is preparing to launch its toughest offensive to date against the Buy-American provision in President Barrack Obama's $787-billion stimulus package. But protectionist sentiment in the U.S. will make it difficult for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to make much headway when the two leaders meet next week at a North-American summit in Guadalajara, Mexico, even with the help of a new bargaining chip. Harper and his trade Minister Stockwell Day scored an important victory Friday when provincial premiers ...

Insurance companies have always been an effective villain in the health-care reform debate, but this year the industry thought things might be different. Recognizing the growing sentiment for some kind of change and fully aware that universal coverage would help bulk up their rolls as baby boomers age into the Medicare system, private insurers early on declared their support for President Obama's health reform effort. So when word came last month that the Democrats were drawing up a ...

The intruders wore masks and carried guns. They went door to door, through the narrow and dusty alleyways, asking if there were any Christians inside. When the terrified faces inside replied yes, they poured chemicals on the small, redbrick homes of Episcopalians and Evangelicals, setting them ablaze. In some cases, they didn't bother with the question. Instead, they opened fire and hurled rocks, forcing families to flee in a panic — moments before fresh flames consumed their homes as ...

Sex on TV has come a long way in the past few years. Anyone who saw the first episode of 90210 — a pair of students engage in oral sex in the first episode of the new sequel to Beverly Hills 90210 — can attest to that. The question that has been debated by parents, psychologists and media critics for years is whether such racy content has an adverse effect on young viewers. Now researchers at the Rand ...

By 2010, Seoul's women should officially be happy — at least the ones with driver's licenses. In May, the city government started to paint 4,929 public and private parking places pink throughout the city, with thousands more slated to go under the brush next year. The pink parking spots, reserved for women drivers so they don't have to walk so far to work or the mall, are part of the South Korean capital's Women Friendly Seoul Project, an effort ...

So accustomed is Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to being under police investigation that he is known to constantly switch phone numbers and to remove the battery from his cell phone during private meetings. After 13 years of on-and-off probes into his private and political affairs, Lieberman has had good reason to believe that Israel's police were bugging his calls. And it certainly came as no surprise to the leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party when the police ...

Each year, Italians take part in a mid-summer ritual to honor the victims of the Mafia and speak out against the scourge of organized crime. From Palermo to Torino, politicians, church leaders and youth groups gather to mark the July 19, 1992, assassination of anti-mob magistrate Paolo Borsellino, who was killed along with five bodyguards in a meticulously planned car bombing outside his mother's apartment in the Sicilian capital. For this year's anniversary, a most unlikely voice spoke out. ...

For a while there, it looked like the doomsayers would be proved right. On July 29, the Shanghai Composite Index lost as much as 7.7% of its value before ending the day down 5% on record-breaking trading volume of $43.3 billion. The sell-off was the largest one-day decline in Chinese stocks in eight months, and set off panic purging in Hong Kong, where the Hang Seng Index lost 2.4%. Even the U.S. got dinged, with the Dow Jones Industrial ...