Syrian state television on Wednesday aired a broadcast of what it said was a rally in support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the second city of Aleppo, Syria's economic hub, claiming it was attended by a million supporters of the embattled leader.

The pro-regime gathering in Aleppo comes a week after a similar rally in the capital, Damascus.

Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston might be closer friends than anyone realized.

Describing Aniston Monday night at Elle magazine's Women in Hollywood event, Witherspoon said, "you just want to get your nails done with her and you want to make out with her at the same time."

Europe's top court says patents cannot be filed on stem-cell research using cells from human embryos, a move many scientists say will harm future advances in medicine.

In a decision issued on Tuesday, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg wrote that a process that involves taking a stem cell from a human embryo, resulting in its destruction, cannot be patented.

A South Korean team led by disgraced stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk is claiming to have cloned coyotes for the first time.

The Sooam Biotech Research Foundation said Monday that eight coyotes were born in June as part of its efforts to clone various species of animals in cooperation with South Korea's Gyeonggi Province.

The gleaming green schooner in Bremen's shipyard says everything about how Greenpeace has grown up through the years.

Three decades ago Greenpeace acquired a converted fishing trawler for $40,000, painted it green and set out to bump hulls with Japanese whalers and disrupt nuclear weapons testing; the first Rainbow Warrior was sunk by French intelligence agents in 1985.

Photos of 20 drawings and other artifacts clandestinely made by inmates at Nazi death camps during World War II are on show at the Auschwitz museum and are to travel next to the United States, an official said Tuesday.

A museum spokesman, Pawel Sawicki, said that the "Forbidden Art" exhibition is on display at the former camp bath building at Auschwitz I, the original, red brick part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

Naomi Campbell put her bad-girl reputation aside as she was honored by the Gabrielle Angel Foundation.

The supermodel says it meant a lot to her to be recognized by such an important cause.

Britain's Treasury said Tuesday it had frozen the assets of five men in connection with the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States.

The finance ministry confirmed that it had acted under the Terrorist Asset Freezing Act, after ministers pledged action in response to the purported plan to kill Saudi envoy Adel Al-Jubeir in a bomb attack.

Soldiers, civil servants and families worked frantically Tuesday to add more than 1 million sandbags to Bangkok's vulnerable northern flood defenses after the city's governor warned they were needed to keep waters from swamping the capital.

Gov. Sukhumbhand Paribatra said late Monday that a 6-kilometer (3.7-mile) flood wall on the edge of the city's suburbs was vulnerable from massive pools of runoff flowing down from the north, signaling the threat to the city was still grave. He said the wall needed to be reinforced by Wednesday night.

Looking dazed, a thin and pale Gilad Shalit emerged from a pickup truck Tuesday under the escort of his Hamas captors and the Egyptian mediators who helped arrange the Israeli tank crewman's release after more than five years in captivity.

Freed in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, an ashen-faced Shalit struggled to breathe in an interview with Egyptian TV minutes after his release, saying that he had feared he would remain in captivity for "many more years." He said he was "very excited" to be headed home and that he missed his family and friends.