In a move bound to provoke U.S. prosecutors and entertainment executives, indicted Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is planning to launch a replacement of his shuttered website and a new online music service by year's end.

The file-sharing site that Dotcom started in 2005 was one of the most popular online sites before U.S. prosecutors shut it down and filed racketeering charges against Dotcom and six other Megaupload principals in January.

Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday marked the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council — the church meetings he attended as a young priest that brought the Catholic Church into the modern world but whose true meaning is still hotly debated.

Benedict celebrated Mass in St. Peter's Square, accompanied by patriarchs, cardinals, bishops and a dozen elderly churchmen who participated in the council, and later will greet the faithful, re-enacting the great procession into St. Peter's that launched the council in 1962.

Turkish state-run television TRT reported Thursday that a Syrian passenger plane intercepted by Turkey's air force was carrying military communications equipment, as Damascus branded the incident piracy amid growing tensions between the two countries.

Yeni Safak, a newspaper close to the Turkish government, reported there were 10 containers aboard the plane, some containing radio receivers, antennas and "equipment that are thought to be missile parts."

Police were called to Lindsay Lohan's childhood home in suburban New York on Wednesday morning after a report of a fight between the troubled actress and her mother.

It was the third run-in involving the actress and New York police officers in the past several weeks.

A man tried to rob a bank of $1 because he hoped to be sent to a federal prison nearby, police said.

Jeffrey McMullen, a 50-year-old regular customer of an AmeriServ bank in the western Pennsylvania town of Northern Cambria, handed notes to two tellers Friday demanding a dollar, according to a police complaint reported by The Tribune-Democrat of Johnstown (http://bit.ly/Qcdx17).

Take this with a grain of salt, or perhaps some almonds or hazelnuts: A study ties chocolate consumption to the number of Nobel Prize winners a country has and suggests it's a sign that the sweet treat can boost brain power.

No, this does not appear in the satirical Onion newspaper. It's in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, which published it online Wednesday as a "note" rather than a rigorous, peer-reviewed study.

It sounds like a scene from a TV show: Someone sends a discarded coffee cup to a laboratory where the unwitting drinker's DNA is decoded, predicting what diseases lurk in his or her future.

A presidential commission found that's legally possible in about half the states — and says new protections to ensure the privacy of people's genetic information are critical if the nation is to realize the enormous medical potential of gene-mapping.

The ice goes on seemingly forever in a white pancake-flat landscape, stretching farther than ever before. And yet in this confounding region of the world, that spreading ice may be a cockeyed signal of man-made climate change, scientists say.

This is Antarctica, the polar opposite of the Arctic.

Turhan Bey, an actor whose exotic good looks earned him the nickname of "Turkish Delight" in films with Errol Flynn and Katherine Hepburn before he left Hollywood for a quieter life in Vienna, has died. He was 90.

Marita Ruiter, who exhibited Bey's photos in her Luxembourg gallery, told the Austria Press Agency on Tuesday that Bey died in the Austrian capital on Sept. 30 after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease and was cremated on Monday.

A California man with many aliases who was behind an anti-Muslim film that sparked violence in the Middle East is expected to be asked by a judge Wednesday whether he violated his probation for a 2010 bank fraud conviction.

Federal prosecutors said Mark Basseley Youssef, 55, had eight probation violations, including lying to his probation officer and using aliases. If Youssef denies those allegations, a judge will then likely schedule an evidentiary hearing.