Talk about a backdoor cut.

The announcement Thursday that negotiations to end the NBA lockout would resume were followed by reports that some players are investigating the possibility of decertifying the union.

After years of quiet, the sun is coming alive with solar storms in a big way.

The sun shot off a flare Thursday afternoon from a region that scientists are calling a "benevolent monster."

Lawn-chair balloonist Kent Couch boarded a plane Thursday for the start of a journey that he hopes will end in Iraq with a safe launch and landing beneath a huge cluster of party balloons.

Couch made headlines worldwide in 2008 when he flew a specially rigged lawn chair supported by more than 150 helium-filled party balloons from the parking lot of the gas station he owns in Bend, Oregon, to an Idaho field. The trip spanned 235 miles.

AC Milan says forward Antonio Cassano has undergone a successful minor heart surgery.

The club says in a statement that the procedure to close a small opening in the Italy international's heart was carried out by Dr. Mario Carminati and that Milan physician Rodolfo Tavana was also present.

Pregnant women in Britain, where the government provides free healthcare, may soon be able to get a cesarean section on demand thanks to a rule change that critics describe as the health system caving into the "too posh to push" crowd.

Currently, British women who can't afford to pay private doctors for their baby's delivery have been allowed to have planned C-sections only if there are health concerns for mother or baby. Emergency C-sections are done when the situation demands it.

In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day.

At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians" also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.

LinkedIn suffered its first quarterly loss since its initial public offering roused Wall Street a few months ago.

The setback, announced Thursday, wasn't as severe as analysts anticipated. The online professional networking service invested in an expansion aimed at changing the way people find jobs and advance their careers.

A man with a history of mental illness has pleaded not guilty in Los Angeles to stalking actress and singer Selena Gomez.

Forty-six-year-old Thomas Brodnicki entered his plea Thursday in Superior Court to one count of stalking. Bail was set at $150,000 and if Brodnicki is convicted he faces up to three years in prison.

They may not be Sonny and Cher, but certain South American birds sing duets, taking turns as the tune goes along.

"Calling it a love song is probably too strong a word," says researcher Eric S. Fortune of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. But, he adds, the little wrens shift their heads around and move closer together as they sing.

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.