When the Islamic State group controlled eastern Mosul, playing music was a crime punishable by lashes. Today, music stall owner Mohammed Mohsin is making up for lost time.

The jihadists' religious police confiscated and burned his CDs after taking over the city in a lightning 2014 offensive.

Penelope Cruz will play her first major television role as Donatella Versace in FX's "Versace: American Crime Story," the third season of the hit show, the network said Monday.

Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" shattered box office records in its opening weekend, taking a monster $175.7 million in North America and $357 million in total, according to industry data released Monday.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once again topped the Forbes magazine list of the world's more than 2,000 billionaires, while U.S. President Donald Trump slipped more than 200 spots, the magazine said Monday.

A bit of cold isn't keeping Norway from basking in the warmth of being the world's happiest country, a UN report out Monday found.

And Norway surged from 4th place in last year's assessment all the way to the top spot, even though oil prices are down, the World Happiness Report 2017 said.

Chuck Berry, one of the creators of rock 'n' roll who helped shape modern youth culture with his dance-ready rhythms but who struggled to overcome institutional racism, died Saturday. He was 90.

Rounder eyes, narrower faces, bigger breasts: a South Korean girlband is celebrating the country's obsession with surgically-enhanced beauty by going under the knife to praise the virtues of "Becoming Pretty".

Staccato lyrics may be no match for Bashar Assad's military firepower, but two brothers, who fled to Paris from Syria and perform as "Refugees of Rap", find sniping with words a liberating experience.

Movie stars Emma Watson and Amanda Seyfried launched legal action Wednesday after private pictures were stolen and posted online, while Mischa Barton spoke of her anguish over a leaked sex tape.

Although the photographs of 26-year-old Watson merely show her trying on outfits, the images of Seyfried and Barton show them in a series of compromising and sexually explicit poses. 

Donald Trump took aim Wednesday at Snoop Dogg, saying the rap star would have gotten "jail time" had he pointed his gun at Barack Obama rather than the current U.S. president in a video.

Snoop Dogg, an early figure in California gangsta rap who has mellowed in recent years, this week released a video pegged to the release of his album "Lavender" in which most actors are clowns.