A Michigan beauty queen of Lebanese origin who made headlines two years ago by becoming the first Arab-American crowned Miss USA will stand trial in March on a drunken-driving charge unless a plea deal is reached, a judge said Wednesday.

Judge Brigette Officer set a March 14 trial date for Rima Fakih, who made her first court appearance since the Dec. 3 traffic stop in the Detroit enclave of Highland Park. Fakih, 26, has said she wasn't drinking that night, but two police breath tests put her blood alcohol content at over twice the legal limit.

Avalanches have killed at least 29 people in Afghanistan's mountainous northeast as rescuers struggled to reach the worst-hit areas cut off by heavy snows, officials said.

The Afghan National Disaster Management Agency said Thursday that at least 40 more people have been injured in a series of avalanches since Monday in Badakhshan province.

Photography icon Eastman Kodak has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as it seeks to boost its cash position and stay in business.

The move comes as the ailing company has failed to find a buyer for its trove of 1,100 digital imaging patents. Kodak said in November that it could run out of cash in a year if it didn't sell the patents, for which it hoped to fetch billions.

British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday accused Hizbullah and its main regional ally Iran of supporting the Syrian regime's violent crackdown on the country's uprising.

Cameron told lawmakers in the House of Commons that both were offering backing to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is leaving the struggling Internet company, as it tries to revive its revenue growth and win over disgruntled shareholders under a new leader.

The departure, announced Tuesday, punctuates the end of an era at Yahoo, a tarnished Internet icon that has spent much of the last decade scrambling to catch up to Internet search leader Google Inc. — a company that got early encouragement and advice from Yang. It comes just two weeks after Yahoo Inc. hired former PayPal executive Scott Thompson as its CEO.

Global bank representatives are due back in Athens to restart debt talks later Wednesday with the government in negotiations that are crucial to avoid a disastrous default.

The heads of the Institute of International Finance, a global banking association, are to return after negotiations stalled last week.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will headline an annual elite gathering of government and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland later this month to address the debt crisis that has gripped global markets for over two years.

Organizers said Wednesday that Merkel will deliver the opening address at the forum at which 2,600 leaders are expected to attend.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened its new library and archives to the public on Tuesday to give scholars and fans access to the stories behind the music through such "artifacts" as personal letters from Madonna and Aretha Franklin and 1981-82 video of the Rolling Stones tour.

The collection, catalogued over the last few years, includes more than 3,500 books, 1,400 audio recordings and 270 videos, and is housed in the new four-story, $12 million building.

An anti-profanity crusader has asked the ABC television network to pull this week's "Modern Family" episode in which a toddler appears to use a bleeped curse word.

"Our main goal is to stop this from happening," McKay Hatch, an 18-year-old college student who founded the No Cussing Club in 2007, said Tuesday. "If we don't, at least ABC knows that people all over the world don't want to have a 2-year-old saying the 'F-bomb' on TV."

Scientists studying white nose syndrome in bats estimate the fungal ailment has killed at least 5.7 million bats in 16 states and Canada, providing alarming new numbers about the scope of its decimation.

White nose is caused by a fungus that prompts bats to wake from their winter hibernation and die after they fly into the cold air in a doomed search for insects. First detected in a cave west of Albany in 2006, white nose has spread to 16 states from the Northeast to the South and as far west as Kentucky. It also has been detected in four Canadian provinces.