Much of the U.S. East Coast has a good chance of getting blasted by gale-force winds, flooding, heavy rain and maybe even snow early next week by an unusual hybrid of hurricane and winter storm, federal and private forecasters say.

Though still projecting several days ahead of Halloween week, the computer models are spooking meteorologists. Government scientists said Wednesday the storm has a 70 percent chance of smacking the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.

Four years after a private eye went to prison for wiretapping phones of the rich and famous on behalf of celebrities and Hollywood heavyweights, his clients are facing hefty bills for his skullduggery.

In the first of more than a dozen lawsuits against Anthony Pellicano's well-heeled clients, a jury last week ruled against the ex-wife of a billionaire philanthropist, awarding $4 million to his three adult children and former personal assistant after she violated their privacy.

Sean "Diddy" Combs was a passenger in an SUV that was hit by another car in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel, but the hip-hop and fashion mogul was not taken to a hospital.

Beverly Hills police Lt. Lincoln Hoshino said Combs was riding in a Cadillac Escalade on Sunset Boulevard Wednesday when a Lexus sedan turned left in front of it, and the vehicles collided.

Scientists have created embryos with genes from one man and two women, using a provocative technique that could someday be used to prevent babies from inheriting certain rare incurable diseases.

The researchers at Oregon Health & Sciences University said they are not using the embryos to produce children, and it is not clear when or even if this technique will be put to use. But it has already stirred a debate over its risks and ethics in Britain, where scientists did similar work a few years ago.

Aspirin, one of the world's oldest and cheapest drugs, has shown remarkable promise in treating colon cancer in people with mutations in a gene that's thought to play a role in the disease.

Among patients with the mutations, those who regularly took aspirin lived longer than those who didn't, a major study found. Five years after their cancers were diagnosed, 97 percent of the aspirin users were still alive versus 74 percent of those not taking the drug.

It could be the muffled sound of singing in the shower or that sing-songy indecipherable voice from the Muppets' Swedish Chef.

Surprisingly, scientists said the audio they captured was a whale imitating people. In fact, the whale song sounded so eerily human that divers initially thought it was a human voice.

The Walt Disney Co. is defending its newest princess following a backlash over her Hispanic-influenced ethnicity.

A new character named Sofia will star in the TV movie "Sofia the First: Once Upon a Princess" airing Nov. 18 on the Disney Channel and Disney Junior. Hispanic advocacy groups have questioned whether the fair-skinned, blue-eyed young princess is an accurate representation of the Hispanic population and wondered why Disney isn't doing more to promote its first princess with Hispanic-inspired roots.

The debt burden of the 17 countries that use the euro rose to 90 percent of the value of its economy at the end of the second quarter, in spite of efforts by many of the countries to cut back on their spending.

The rise reported Wednesday by Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, from the previous quarter's 88.2 percent provides further evidence that stalling economic growth is making it harder for eurozone countries to handle their debts.

Nintendo Co. trimmed its red ink for the fiscal first half to a 28 billion yen ($350 million) loss, but the Japanese game maker lowered its sales and profit forecasts for the full year ahead of the launch of its new Wii U home console.

Nintendo, which did not break down quarterly results, had reported a 70 billion yen loss for the April-September period last year.

Samsung Electronics Co. said Wednesday it expects 10 percent growth in PC sales by volume this year as it bets on new PCs that are hybrids of laptops and tablets to lift sluggish PC demand.

Samsung's PC team chief said the company hopes the ATIV series of laptops and tablets, which are powered by a new version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, would help lift its sales at a difficult time for the PC industry.