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In the 1960s, Janis Joplin was an icon of the counterculture, a female rock star at a time when rock was an all-boys' club.

"At that point in time there weren't too many women taking center stage," biographer Holly George-Warren says. "Janis created this incredible image that went along with her amazing vocal ability. ... [She] was very, very different than most of the women that came before."

The U.S. may now keep some troops in northeast Syria, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Monday. It is the latest in a series of consequential pivots the Trump administration has made in its Syria policy.

Esper said the troops are needed to secure oil fields from falling into the hands of ISIS and profiting from them, The Associated Press reports. But most recently it was Russian mercenaries, not ISIS fighters, who tried to seize the oil fields and who were repulsed by U.S. airstrikes, NPR's Tom Bowman reports.

Both Matt White and Heather Woock grew up thinking they knew who their respective parents were. Then, in their mid-thirties, both discovered that fertility doctors that their respective mothers had visited had secretly used their own semen while conducting treatments.

The rap on Mitt Romney is that though he isn't a fan of President Trump, when he speaks out, it's in a fairly lukewarm way.

And then it was revealed over the weekend that he's been behind an anonymous Twitter account under the nom de plume Pierre Delecto.

Brain scientists are offering a new reason to control blood sugar levels: It might help lower your risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

"There's many reasons to get [blood sugar] under control," says David Holtzman, chairman of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis. "But this is certainly one."

Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET

Three of the biggest U.S. drug distributors and a drug manufacturer have reached a last-minute deal with two Ohio counties to avoid what would have been the first trial in a landmark federal case on the opioid crisis.

Summit and Cuyahoga counties announced Monday morning that the tentative deal amounts to roughly $260 million.

In the fall, livestock veterinarian Dr. Bailey Lammers is often busy with vaccinating calves and helping wean them from their mothers.

A herd of auburn cattle greeted her at the barn gate during one of her house calls in northeastern Nebraska, peering from behind the dirt-caked bars. Lammers and her technician Sadie Kalin pulled equipment from tackleboxes in the back of Lammers’ truck.  

Uganda explicitly bars government officials from accepting gifts of any kind from cigarette-makers. French and British officials must publicly announce any encounters with representatives of the industry. Thailand and the Philippines won't even let officials take a meeting except under the narrowest of circumstances.

These are some of the measures deployed by countries around the world to limit influence over their anti-smoking policies, according to the first-ever Global Tobacco Industry Interference Index.

October marks the start of a new flu season, with a rise in likely cases already showing up in Louisiana and other spots, federal statistics show.

The advice from federal health officials remains clear and consistent: Get the flu vaccine as soon as possible, especially if you're pregnant or have asthma or another underlying condition that makes you more likely to catch a bad case.

In France, McDonald's is often a symbol of everything that's despised about American capitalism and fast-food culture. One Paris neighborhood battled for years to keep the golden arches from settling in between its traditional butchers and bakers (it eventually lost). And the actions of an anti-globalization farmer named José Bové, who tried to dismantle a McDonald's 20 years ago, are legendary.

But for the last year, a group of McDonald's employees in the southern French city of Marseille has been fighting to save its McDonald's restaurant.

The last time Samya Stumo's family heard from her, she had sent a text letting them know she was about to board an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. She would write again when she got there, she promised.

But the 24-year-old from western Massachusetts was among 157 people who were killed when the flight crashed last March.

For her family, it was the start of a painful, grief-choked odyssey that has turned them and dozens of other families into reluctant activists, taking on federal regulators and Boeing over the crashes of two 737 Max airplanes.

The U.S. ambassador to China is pushing back against Beijing's criticism of a new State Department requirement that Chinese diplomats must report certain meetings they have in the U.S.

The State Department announced Wednesday that it is requiring all Chinese diplomats in the U.S. to notify them of meetings they plan to have with local and state officials as well as educational and research institutions. However, there is no penalty associated yet with failing to report such meetings.

President Trump's acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, on Sunday again tried to control the damage from his earlier acknowledgment that the White House used nearly $400 million in aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate the 2016 presidential election.

Since Mulvaney made the stunning admission on Thursday, he has been walking the remarks back and assigning responsibility to the media, insisting that his words have been misconstrued.

Updated at 4:02 p.m. ET

An early morning training exercise gone wrong resulted in the deaths of three U.S. Army soldiers and injured three more at Fort Stewart, in Georgia, on Sunday, according to Fort Stewart officials.

The soldiers were riding a Bradley Fighting Vehicle when around 3:20 a.m., it flipped over and rolled into water, a news release from Fort Stewart said.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper traveled to Afghanistan on Saturday in an effort to restart peace talks with the Taliban after President Trump scrapped plans for negotiations at Camp David last month.

The 12,000-year-old Hambach Forest in western Germany is under threat. The country's biggest power company, RWE, has been clearing the ancient natural resource to make room for coal mining. Currently, there is only 10% left of the forest's original 13,500 acres.

Hoping to halt the decimation, environmental activists have been squatting in the forest since 2012.

A brainless, bright-yellow organism that can solve mazes and heal itself is making its debut at a Paris zoo this weekend.

At least so far, "the blob" is more benevolent than the ravenous star of its 1950s sci-fi film classic namesake.