This year's Venice Film Festival will tackle topics from the financial crisis to drone warfare, and feature performances from Willem Dafoe, Al Pacino and Ethan Hawke.

Organizers on Thursday announced a 20-strong competition lineup that includes Ramin Bahrani's subprime mortgage drama "99 Homes," with Andrew Garfield and Laura Dern, and Andrew Niccol's "The Good Kill," starring Hawke as a dissatisfied drone operator.

Double Olympic gold medalist Mo Farah has pulled out of the Commonwealth Games because he has not recovered fully from a recent illness.

Team England said Thursday on the opening day of the games that Farah, who had planned to run the 5,000 and 10,000 meters — the same distances he won gold at during the London Games in 2012 — would remain at his training base in France.

Basel has signed former Champions League-winning defender Walter Samuel on a one-year contract.

The 36-year-old Argentina international was a free agent after his nine-year spell at Inter Milan ended last season.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy is getting his old look back on new collectors' coins.

The slain president's profile debuted on the half dollar 50 years ago, and the image was subtly tweaked and sharpened in the 1990s. Now the U.S. Mint is producing collectors' coins that restore the original 1964 design, which incorporated suggestions from a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy.

Like Batman responding to a beaming Bat signal in the sky, fans are streaming to San Diego for the 45th annual Comic-Con pop culture extravaganza.

The four-day festival celebrating film, TV, video games, comic books, costumes and other popular arts kicks off with a preview Wednesday night and goes full force Thursday at the San Diego Convention Center.

So let's start with the enticing premise of Luc Besson's "Lucy," starring Scarlett Johansson: Human beings only use 10 percent of their brain capacity. Imagine what it would be like if we could access all of it?

Well, wow. It would be sort of like ... nothing new. Because, it turns out, in real life, humans pretty much DO use their whole brains.

Facebook and most other social networks are built on the premise that just about everything should be shared —except the money those posts produce.

At least two services are trying to change that. Bubblews, a social network that came out of out of an extended test phase last week, pays users for posts that attract traffic and advertisers. Another company, Bonzo Me, has been doing something similar since early July.

Peaches Geldof, daughter of Live Aid founder Bob Geldof, was a heroin addict who died from a drug overdose, a coroner ruled on Wednesday.

Her husband told a hearing that the 25-year-old TV presenter had started taking the drug again in February this year, having given it up three months earlier.

The "Colbert Bump" is becoming contagious.

Edan Lepucki, whose novel "California" became a best-seller thanks to a plug from Stephen Colbert, has in turn helped another book catch on.

Gay actors shouldn't have a monopoly on gay roles, award-winning stage and screen actor Nathan Lane said.

Lane, who is gay and has played both straight and gay characters, was asked the question at a TV critics' meeting Tuesday. He was there to discuss PBS' presentation of the Broadway play "The Nance," in which he stars.