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TULSA, Okla. – In a turn perhaps inspired by Vince Vaughn or Owen Wilson, Oprah Winfrey crashed several Tulsa wedding receptions over the weekend, collecting footage that will be seen on her show. “When we were getting ready, we heard that Oprah was in town buying wedding gifts,” said Sarah …

WASHINGTON – Marijuana use worldwide is out of control because the plant grows everywhere, is in high demand and erroneously is considered by many to be harmless, a U.N. agency said Monday. Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, highlighted the marijuana problem …

MADISON, Wisconsin – A retired farmer who claims he was a Nazi SS officer has agreed not to open a memorial he built to Hitler, local officials say. Ted Junker, 87, had planned a grand opening for his shrine June 25 on his farm in southeastern Wisconsin. Word of the …

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – A lost diver who was the subject of a U.S. Coast Guard search managed to swim 10 miles through heavy seas to safety, authorities said Thursday. Marcos Calzada Colon said that at one point he followed a pod of whales because he thought they would …

It must just kill Al Gore that he’s not president. It must be a terrible burning tumor in his gut that eats at him every single day of his life. I say that must be true because there really is no other explanation for what he is doing. Here we’ve …

NEW YORK – Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL) on Tuesday cut the price of its cheapest digital music player, the iPod Shuffle, and launched a smaller-capacity version of its mid-priced iPod Nano, sending its shares up as much as 3 percent. Apple, which controls 70 percent of the U.S. digital music …

WASHINGTON – A defense contractor admitted Friday that he paid a California congressman more than $1 million in bribes in exchange for millions more in government contracts. Mitchell Wade pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to conspiring with former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham to bribe the lawmaker with cash, cars …

LONDON – Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate on Wednesday accused the British Broadcasting Corp. of using taxpayers’ money to build a “digital empire” that would compete with commercial rivals. The BBC, which receives about 3 billion pounds ($5.3 billion) a year in public funding, has announced plans to relaunch its Web …

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Namibian authorities are clamping down on journalists trying to follow Brad Pitt, pregnant Angelina Jolie and her two adopted children after the couple asked for some privacy, according to a newspaper report Sunday. South Africa’s Sunday Times said the couple’s security chief gave a local journalist …

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – The source of a spike in dangerous fungal eye infections linked by federal health officials to a contact lens solution sold by Bausch & Lomb Inc. remains a mystery, the eye-care products maker said Wednesday. “As far as speculation about theories, there’s a lot of them, we’ve …