Van Halen will tour in 2012.

The rock band has posted a video on its website announcing that the first tickets will go on sale Jan. 10.

A giant saltwater crocodile named Elvis with an apparent affinity for household machinery charged at an Australian reptile park worker Wednesday before stealing his lawn mower.

Tim Faulkner, operations manager at the Australian Reptile Park, north of Sydney, was one of three workers tending to the lawn in Elvis' enclosure when he heard reptile keeper Billy Collett let out a yelp. Faulkner looked up to see the 16-foot (5-meter), 1,100-pound (500-kilogram) crocodile lunging out of its lagoon at Collett, who warded the creature off with his mower.

A Florida animal sanctuary says Cheetah the chimpanzee from the Tarzan movies of the early 1930s has died at age 80.

The Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor announced that Cheetah died Dec. 24 of kidney failure.

Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract painter known for her bold, lyrical use of color who led a postwar art movement that would later be termed Color Field painting, died Tuesday at her home in Connecticut, her nephew said. She was 83.

One of Frankenthaler's most famous works is "Mountains and Sea," a 1952 painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which she created by pouring thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor.

Mildewed feed given to cows caused the high levels of a cancer-causing toxin found in milk from China's biggest dairy company and a smaller one, according to a government safety agency investigating the troubled dairy industry's latest scandal.

An expert review identified the mildewed feed as the cause of the excessive levels of aflatoxin in milk from industry giant Mengniu Dairy Group and the Fujian Changfu Dairy Industry Group, the quality supervision and inspection agency said in a statement posted on its website late Monday.

Drug companies are working to develop a pure, more powerful version of a highly abused medicine, which has addiction experts worried that it could spur a new wave of abuse.

The new pills contain the highly addictive painkiller hydrocodone, packing up to 10 times the amount of the drug as existing medications such as Vicodin. Four companies have begun patient testing, and one of them — Zogenix of San Diego — plans to apply early next year to begin marketing its product, Zohydro.

A surgeon and technician from a Mayo Clinic in Florida flying across the northern corner of the state to retrieve a heart for transplant died Monday in a helicopter crash that also killed the pilot, officials said.

The helicopter departed the clinic in Jacksonville around 5:45 a.m. but never arrived at the Gainesville hospital, Shands at University of Florida, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) to the southwest, said Kathy Barbour, a spokeswoman for Mayo, which is based in Rochester, Minnesota.

For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized "cleanroom" where the equipment was stored.

The moon has come a long way since Galileo first peered at it through a telescope. Unmanned probes have circled around it and landed on its surface. Twelve American astronauts have walked on it. And lunar rocks and soil have been hauled back from it.

Despite being well studied, Earth's closest neighbor remains an enigma.

Utah police say a woman used Facebook to get help after she and her 17-month-old son were held hostage at a residence for nearly five days.

Salt Lake County Jail documents say the woman posted on Saturday that she and her son would be "dead by morning" if they were not rescued. That prompted a welfare check at the home by Sandy police.