It's time to find out whether Girl Power is still going strong, with the premiere of a new stage musical based on the songs of the Spice Girls.

The members of the 1990s girl group — Baby, Sporty, Scary, Ginger and Posh — are expected on the red carpet for Tuesday's opening night of "Viva Forever" at London's Piccadilly Theater.

After years of battling each other on trade issues, U.S. and European officials are contemplating a dramatic change in direction: joining together in what could be the world's largest free-trade pact in an attempt to boost their struggling economies.

Discussions are in the most preliminary of stages and there would be significant obstacles to overcome, including sharp differences on agriculture, food safety and climate change legislation. Still, top European Union and U.S. officials have said they want to see it happen. And America's main labor federation, often the biggest opponent to U.S. trade pacts, says it wouldn't stand in the way.

All professional footballers and managers in England and newcomers from abroad will have "cultural lessons" regarding discrimination as part of proposals to fight racism.

The move is part of the reaction by the Professional Footballers' Association to government pleas for more to be done to stop discrimination.

Rafael Nadal is ready to return to competitive tennis, confirming Tuesday that he'll play in an exhibition tournament in Abu Dhabi at the end of the month following a six-month break to recover from a knee injury.

"Can't wait to get back on court in Abu Dhabi at the end of the month," the 11-time Grand Slam champion said on his Facebook page and Twitter account. "I won the Mubadala World Tennis Championship in 2010 and 2011 — would love to get my hands on the trophy again this year!"

With the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam closed for renovations, the world's second-largest collection of the tortured Dutch master's work is stepping into the limelight.

The lesser-known Kroeller-Mueller museum in the eastern Netherlands has revamped the layout of its central rooms, giving more space and focus to many of its top works.

Microsoft is rolling out dozens of new apps for the Xbox 360, building on statistics that show members of its paid online subscription service spend more time on it watching video than they do playing multiplayer games over the Internet.

The company said Tuesday that by early next year it will add more than 40 apps to its Xbox Live service, such as MTV, The CW Network and CBC's Hockey Night in Canada. Many of the apps will require paid subscriptions on top of the Xbox Live Gold subscription, which costs $60 a year, or $10 a month.

A holiday tradition in this upstate New York resort town has a peppermint twist: pig-shaped hard candies are sold with little metal hammers to smash them at Christmas.

The peppermint pigs, which can weigh up to a pound, are considered good luck charms by some. Family members will take turns whacking the piggy tokens of holiday cheer into little candy shards.

Biotech pioneer Amgen Inc., in a bid for a big edge in using people's genetic information to find better ways to attack diseases, is buying human genetics research and analytics leader deCODE Genetics for $415 million.

Amgen, the world's largest biotech company by revenue, and deCODE, based in Reykjavik, Iceland, announced the all-cash deal Monday.

In the Colorado mountains, a spike in air pollution has been linked to a boom in oil and gas drilling. On the plains of north Texas, there's a drilling boom, too, but some air pollution levels have declined. Opponents of drilling point to Colorado and say it's dangerous. Companies point to Texas and say drilling is safe.

The good news, nearly all sides agree, is that the technology exists to control methane gas leaks and other air pollution associated with drilling. The bad news is that the industry is booming so rapidly in the U.S. that some companies and some regulators can't seem to get ahead of the problems, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars to remedy.

U.S. authorities said a medical helicopter has crashed in northern Illinois, killing all three people on board.

The Federal Aviation Administration reported the helicopter crashed Monday night while traveling from Rockford, near the Wisconsin border, to a hospital about 60 miles (100 kilometers) south in Mendota.