The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Monday its teams have succeeded in entering the central Syrian city of Hama for the first time in over a month.

A Red Cross spokesman in Geneva said a joint team of the ICRC and Syrian Arab Red Crescent brought an emergency delivery of food and other items for 12,000 people.

It's a desert oasis that hangs its priciest paintings on casino walls, where neon signs are a point of pride and themed-hotels pay tribute to architecture's golden eras. Still, Las Vegas' cultural offerings have long taken a back seat to the glamour and crudity of its most notorious vices. People come here to party, the stereotype goes, not broaden their artistic horizons.

Now a new $470 million arts complex is daring to challenge that. The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, a gleaming art deco-inspired jewel in a downtown redevelopment zone, hopes to reintroduce Las Vegas as a cultural destination in its own right.

For the past two decades, the U.S. space agency has been practically obsessed with Mars. It has hardly missed an opportunity about every two years to fling robotic spacecraft at the red planet.

This summer, the most high-tech rover ever, Curiosity, will land near the Martian equator in search of the chemical building blocks of life. The more scientists study Mars, the closer they get to answering whether microbial life once existed there, a clue to the ultimate question: Are we alone?

A Canadian Via Rail passenger train derailed west of Toronto Sunday, killing three railroad employees and injuring dozens of passengers, officials said.

Via Rail spokeswoman Michelle Lamarche said the three people killed were all engineers riding in the cab of the locomotive at the front of the train when it derailed in Burlington, Ontario. A fourth Via worker in the locomotive was injured, she said.

Singer Celine Dion has canceled several upcoming concerts in Las Vegas because of a virus.

Caesars Palace officials said her doctor advised her to rest for a week to recover from the virus, which caused an inflammation of her vocal cords. Shows scheduled for Friday, Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday were canceled at the resort's Colosseum.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatened to launch a powerful retaliatory strike against South Korea if provoked, state media said Sunday, a day before the start of annual South Korean-U.S. military drills that Pyongyang calls an invasion rehearsal.

South Korean and U.S. officials have said that the 12-day, largely computer-simulated war games set to start Monday are defensive in nature.

On the cusp of trial over the catastrophic 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, phalanxes of lawyers, executives and public officials have spent the waning days in settlement talks. Holed up in small groups inside law offices, war rooms and hotel suites in New Orleans and Washington, they are trying to put a number on what BP and its partners in the doomed Macondo well project should pay to make up for the worst offshore spill in U.S. history.

It is a complex equation, and the answer is proving elusive.

President Barack Obama says there is no easy answer to the problem of rising energy prices, dismissing Republican plans to address the problem as little more than gimmicks.

"We know there's no silver bullet that will bring down gas prices or reduce our dependence on foreign oil overnight," Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address. "But what we can do is get our priorities straight and make a sustained, serious effort to tackle this problem."

Officials are puzzled over a mysterious hot tub that was installed — and then removed — from the roof of a building on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor.

But a group of "creative" students are believed to be the culprits, Computer Science and Engineering building spokesman Steven Crang told (http://bit.ly/x5jEya ) AnnArbor.com on Friday.

The battle of the bulge has been a big, fat failure for U.S. drug makers. But that hasn't stopped them from trying.

For nearly a century, scientists have struggled to make a diet pill that helps people lose weight without side effects that range from embarrassing digestive issues to dangerous heart problems.