Quadruple amputee Philippe Croizon swam between islands in the icy Bering Strait Friday to cross from America to Asia in the final part of a quest to link all continents.
A topless Ukrainian feminist felled a cross with a chainsaw, balaclava-clad New Yorkers braved arrest to picket an Orthodox church and Bulgarian punks re-decorated a war memorial.
Two silhouettes cut through the water a few hundred yards (metres) from a rainy, windswept beach bordering the flat grasslands near the small Inuit community of Wales, in the far west of Alaska.
Heartened by a glimpse of what may be the Higgs boson, scientists at the CERN physics lab are smashing particles with new vigour in a quest to understand why matter has mass and other riddles of the natural universe.
A modest ski area in the French Alps is ready to unbolt its chairlifts and rope off slopes as the local mayor concludes that climate change means the trails ahead will be rocky.
Small but significant breakthrough studies on people who have been able to overcome or control HIV were presented Thursday at a major world conference on ways to stem the three-decade-old disease.
Irish actor Pierce Brosnan, star of Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" and a former James Bond incarnation, was among some 2,700 fans cheering US pop icon Madonna at her Paris concert Thursday.
Sunbed users run a 20 percent higher risk than non-users of developing skin cancer, according to a report that blamed some 800 melanoma deaths in Europe every year on indoor tanning.
A newlywed homosexual Frenchman is on a mission to prove that "being gay and Muslim is possible" after feeling forced for years to choose between his religion and sexuality.
Batman movie director Christopher Nolan lamented Friday the "senseless tragedy' and "unbearably savage" gunning down of 12 movie goers at a Colorado theater screening of "The Dark Knight Rises."
A French startup behind email applications for Apple gadgets has been bought by Google as the Internet titan increasingly tailors hit software to run on its rival's hardware.
French lawmakers voted Thursday to reduce the salaries of President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault by 30 percent as part of a series of budget-cutting moves.
Some scientists say sporting records are starting to flatline and one day will become near impossible to beat without drugs, gene splicing or futuristic technology.
France's far-right National Front said Sunday it plans to sue Madonna over a video at the US pop star's concert in France showing party leader Marine Le Pen with a swastika on her forehead.
Fifty years ago Thursday a beach ball-sized satellite carried the first television images across the Atlantic, kicking off a new era of global communications decades before the Internet.
French President Francois Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron tried Tuesday to laugh off a rocky start to their relationship despite lingering differences over the eurozone crisis.