George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and other red-carpet veterans joined some Hollywood newcomers in the Southern California desert this weekend to kick off the two-month-long movie award season at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

"When you're of age: drink," Clooney noted to the newcomers at Saturday night's gala awards ceremony. "That's good advice to pretty much anybody."

Iran's nuclear chief says his country is willing to help what he called "friendly" African nations that have uranium reserves to set up facilities to process the ore into nuclear material.

Fereidoun Abbasi says Iran has mastered the entire nuclear fuel cycle from extracting uranium ore to producing fuel for reactors and is ready to share the technology. Abbasi's comment was reported by the semi-official Mehr news agency Saturday.

Tom Hanks' long gestating Web series is coming to Yahoo.

"Electric City," an animated futuristic series Hanks has been developing for years, will premiere on Yahoo this spring. The series includes 20 episodes, each three- or four-minutes long.

Inside Louisiana's Civil War Museum, battle flags line the walls. Uniforms, swords and long-barreled guns fill museum cases beside homespun knapsacks, dented canteens and tiny framed pictures of wives that soldiers carried into battle.

In the back, there's a collection devoted to Jefferson Davis, one-time president of the Confederacy formed by the southern states which seceded from the United States in 1861, complete with his top hat and fancy shoes at the spot where his body once lay in state.

A leopard that wandered into a city in eastern India went on a rampage, killing one man, swiping off part of another man's scalp and injuring three other people before authorities tranquilized the animal.

Neighbors in Gauhati said the big cat attacked a 50-year-old lawyer as he talked on his cell phone Sunday evening outside his house. He was rushed to hospital where he died.

Scientists are warning that the devastating drought in Texas could threaten the world's only remaining flock of whooping cranes.

The birds eat blue crabs and berries during their annual migration to the Gulf Coast. The high-protein diet is supposed to sustain North America's tallest bird through the winter and prepare it for the nesting season in Canada. But this year, the drought has made food and water scarce.

The Philippine president warned on Sunday of a possible terrorist attack, including bombings, during an annual Roman Catholic procession in Manila that draws millions of devotees.

President Benigno Aquino III, standing with top military, police and defense officials, told a hastily called news conference that several terrorists planning to disrupt Monday's religious procession have been sighted in the capital. Police are attempting to arrest the suspects and disrupt any planned attack, he said.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad left on Sunday for a five-day Latin American tour that will let him tout some of Iran's few friendships while tensions grow over the country's threats to block oil shipments in retaliation for tighter U.S. sanctions.

His government finds itself largely isolated in the standoff over its nuclear program, and the new sanctions targeting Iran's Central Bank and oil industry have triggered an abrupt drop in the nation's currency.

A cargo ship grounded off the New Zealand coast since October has split in two, spilling sea containers and debris and sparking fears of a fresh oil spill, maritime officials said Sunday.

The wreck of the Greek-owned Rena was described as New Zealand's worst maritime environmental disaster even before the rear section of the ship, lashed by pounding seas, broke away overnight. The ship previously spilled heavy fuel oil that fouled pristine North Island beaches and killed up to 20,000 seabirds, and despite salvage efforts nearly 400 tons of oil remain onboard.

A group of employees at a California school district who won a $12 million lotto prize last year has done it again and now stands to collect another pot worth more than a quarter of a million dollars.

State lottery officials announced Friday that the same Montebello Unified School District workers who won $12 million last February have won a MEGA Millions prize worth $262,743.