Health officials now think Ebola survivors can spread the disease through unprotected sex nearly twice as long as previously believed.

Scientists thought the Ebola virus could remain in semen for about three months. But a recent case in West Africa suggests infection through sex can happen more than five months later.

Hang up on Pope Francis and you might get a hug.

Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano says earlier this week, Francis dialed an ailing Italian man to comfort him. Francis has a habit of calling people who he has heard are suffering and telling them "Hello, I'm Pope Francis" when they answer their phone.

A New Jersey man is accused of stealing enough musical equipment to outfit quite a few bands.

Philadelphia police said Friday that Jason Mackenzie of Berlin, New Jersey, has been charged with burglary and related offenses in a break-in at a self-storage unit on Castor Avenue.

A Tennessee woman who ran the Boston Marathon is looking for the man she kissed on a dare.

Barbara Tatge says her daughter, Paige, dared her to kiss a random, good-looking man and take a photo of it as she ran her first Boston Marathon on April 20.

Two years after fleeing from her home in Damascus, 22-year-old Rahaf Abdullah is working at a gleaming mall in Iraq's Kurdish region, selling sweets to local women who largely refuse to take such jobs.

While the mall job is a rite of passage for teenagers in America, in Iraq's conservative and relatively well-off Kurdish region the idea of women working — particularly in menial or retail jobs — is frowned upon. That has created opportunities for some of the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees and displaced Iraqis who have sought refuge here.

Actor Nicholas Brendon says a warrant for his arrest in Florida is a "huge misunderstanding."

Brendon, who has appeared on the television series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Criminal Minds," was arrested in March in Tallahassee after a disturbance at a hotel.

Actress Sofia Vergara's ex- fiancé's demands that she give him two frozen embryos they created — referring to them as "our girls" — highlights the wider legal and ethical issues surrounding frozen embryos created by in-vitro fertilization.

Businessman Nick Loeb wrote Wednesday on NYTimes.com that he has sued the "Modern Family" star for the embryos because he longs to become a parent and doesn't want the "two lives" they created to "be destroyed or sit in a freezer until the end of time."

U.S. Navy ships will begin accompanying U.S.-flagged commercial ships when they transit the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. defense officials said on Thursday.

The move is in response to what Washington views as provocative Iranian behavior in the Persian Gulf.

German measles is officially gone from North and South America, the first region to rid itself of the disease, health officials announced Wednesday.

Vaccines against German measles were first licensed in 1969, and were included in mass vaccination campaigns. It is now part of childhood shots.

A Los Angeles jury awarded $13 million to a 73-year-old woman who contracted a deadly disease from using asbestos-containing talcum powder manufactured by Colgate-Palmolive Co.

Jurors deliberated for two hours Tuesday before finding that New York-based Colgate was 95 percent responsible for Judith Winkel's mesothelioma, a fatal lung disease, according to her lawyers. The verdict included $1.4 million in damages for her husband.