LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Don Cornelius, creator of the iconic TV music and dance show "Soul Train" that helped introduce Americans to black pop culture, died on Wednesday after shooting himself in the head, Los Angeles officials said.

Police found the body of Cornelius, 75, at his house in the wealthy, hillside area of Los Angeles called Sherman Oaks at around 4 a.m on Wednesday. He was later pronounced dead at a local hospital.

"The death was reported as a suicide, a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head," Los Angeles coroner's Assistant Chief Ed Winter said. Police said there was no evidence of foul play.

It was not immediately known why Cornelius would have taken his own life, although he was said to have been in failing health in recent years.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Forty years ago, Dick Clark's New Year's Eve special was created to give young people an alternative to a seasonal institution, bandleader Guy Lombardo.

Now Clark's annual show is the institution.

"New Year's Rockin' Eve," with Clark and Ryan Seacrest, pays tribute to its own history during a sprawling, nearly six-hour program Saturday night. The celebration takes up all of prime time on ABC, breaks for a half-hour of local news, then comes back on the air for two and a quarter hours that includes the ball dropping in New York City's Times Square to mark the beginning of 2012.

"I'm looking forward to it being 2:15 (a.m. on Sunday)," said Larry Klein, who has been producing the show since 1977.

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A large metallic ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.

With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of "two halves welded together".

It was made of a "metal alloy known to man" and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.

It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.

Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.

The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find.

Police deputy inspector general Vilho Hifindaka concluded the sphere did not pose any danger.

"It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first," he said.

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Banks gobbled up nearly 490 billion euros in three-year cut-price loans from the European Central Bank on Wednesday, easing immediate fears of a credit crunch but leaving unresolved how much will flow to needy euro zone economies.

Following a string of failed attempts by euro zone leaders to thwart market attacks on the bloc's weaker members, hopes of crisis relief before the year-end had been pinned on a massive uptake of the ECB's ultra-long and ultra-cheap loans.

The near half a trillion euro take-up of ECB funds exceeded almost all forecasts. A total of 523 banks borrowed with demand way above the 310 billion euros expected by traders polled by Reuters, making it the most the bank has ever pumped into the financial system.

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AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Former Miss Venezuela Eva Ekvall, who appeared bald and without makeup in a recent book about her struggle against breast cancer, died in Houston on Saturday after losing her battle with the disease, according to Venezuelan TV news network Globovision. She was 28.

The former beauty queen had worked to promote cancer awareness since being diagnosed in 2010.

The hospital in Houston where she reportedly passed away, and the funeral home there where her body was taken declined to comment on news of her death.

Ekvall won the Miss Venezuela title in 2000 and was a third runner-up for Miss Universe in 2001. She also worked as an actress and television anchor.

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LONDON (Reuters) - Michael Jackson's daughter Paris gave a rare televised interview this week, during which she discussed life with her late father and a budding acting career.

The 13-year-old's appearance on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" has already been taped and airs on Thursday.

According to a partial transcript released to publicize the show, Paris said that as a younger child she felt it was "stupid" wearing a mask when she went out in public with her famous father.

Jackson, who died aged 50 in 2009, would sometimes give his children masks to wear to protect them from the frenzy of media and public attention that accompanied their every appearance.

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BRENTWOOD, N.H. (AP) — A New Hampshire man was sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison Friday for beating his wife to death with a flashlight after he came home to find she had strangled their 4-year-old son with a ribbon and tried to kill their 7-year-old daughter.

Christopher Smeltzer, 38, pleaded guilty to killing Mara Pappalardo, who was hospitalized several times for mental illness. Prosecutors say she was paranoid, obsessed with death and convinced her husband and mother-in-law were plotting to take her children away.

"When I walked into the room, as soon as I saw my son, I knew something was very wrong," Smeltzer told the court before he was sentenced, his voice breaking at times. "I knew he was dead. And I lost all control. Enraged, I struck my wife. I did something that was not going to bring my son back."

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(Reuters) - U.S. retailers moved from the frenzied start of the holiday shopping season to the next phase on Saturday, hoping to avoid a drop after Black Friday and keep the momentum going during a fitful economic recovery.

After featuring the usual deep discounts on Thanksgiving on Thursday and on Friday, retailers were still offering bargains on Saturday as holiday spending is expected to show only about half the growth of last year.

The holiday shopping season that traditionally kicks off on Black Friday - the biggest day of the year for retailers - is closely watched by investors as consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Consumer sentiment held up in late November as some of the gloom over the economic outlook ebbed, a survey released on Wednesday showed.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's final reading on the overall index on consumer sentiment came in at 64.1, up from 60.9 the month before.

The index was a hair lower than its preliminary reading of 64.2 and shy of the median forecast of 64.5 among economists polled by Reuters.

"The most important aspect of improved prospects for the economy was that consumers anticipated slight job gains," survey director Richard Curtin said in a statement.

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For more than half a century, geologists have wrangled over the origins of an astonishing range of mountains found beneath ice up to three kilometers (two miles) thick in East Antarctica.

Named after the Soviet geophysicist who detected them in 1958 during the first International Polar Year exploration, the Gamburtsev mountains are 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) long, with jagged peaks up to 2,700 meters (8,900 feet) high intersected by deep troughs and valleys.

How this chain came into being is one of the many mysteries of the great white continent.

The Gamburtsevs are located at high elevation and on a continent that geologically is ancient and long free of the tectonic upheaval that throws up mountains.

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