AP - With the death of Whitney Houston just hours earlier, it's hard to focus on the matter of crowning the best in recorded music — but Sunday night's Grammy Awards are going to try.

AP - Whitney Houston's last days were spent surrounded by family, catching up with old friends and doing a bit of what she was best known for: singing.

AP - Al-Qaida's leader has called for the ouster of Syria's "pernicious, cancerous regime," raising fears that Islamic extremists will try to exploit an uprising against President Bashar Assad that began with peaceful calls for democratic change but is morphing into a bloody, armed insurgency.

AP - Conservatives said Sunday the flap surrounding President Barack Obama's birth control mandate was far from over, with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell saying he'll push to overturn the requirement because it was another example of government meddling.

AP - A day after Mitt Romney regained some momentum in the Republican presidential contest, his rival Rick Santorum went on the attack, calling the front-runner "desperate" while promising to compete aggressively to win the state where Romney grew up.

AP - Rioting spread across central Athens and at least seven buildings went up in flames amid mass protests late Sunday, as lawmakers debated harsh cutbacks demanded to keep the country solvent and within the eurozone.

AP - Mitt Romney takes a hard line against congressional earmarks, but the GOP presidential front-runner had a more favorable view of federal pork-barrel spending when he was governor of Massachusetts.

AP - Piece by piece, in backpacks and carry-on bags, American aid contractor Alan Gross made sure laptops, smartphones, hard drives and networking equipment were secreted into Cuba. The most sensitive item, according to official trip reports, was the last one: a specialized mobile phone chip that experts say is often used by the Pentagon and the CIA to make satellite signals virtually impossible to track.

AP - A dream honeymoon to scuba dive on Australia's Great Barrier Reef turned into a terrible nightmare, and the horror is about to play out years later in a courtroom in Alabama.

AP - Rescuers have pulled a 5-year-old girl alive from the rubble of a house flattened by a massive avalanche that killed both her parents and at least seven of her relatives in a remote mountain village in southern Kosovo.