The Weinstein Company's fall slate of awards contenders will feature a glamorous Grace Kelly, a brawny Nelson Mandela and a mysterious J.D. Salinger.

Harvey Weinstein previewed some of his company's most anticipated upcoming releases at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday. He's made a habit of such previews, doing the same in 2012 for the Oscar-winning films "Django Unchained" and "Silver Linings Playbook." Last year, Weinstein said, was "as good as any year at Miramax" — the first film company run by Weinstein and his brother Bob.

With much of Capitol Hill riveted by IRS audits, AP phone records, and Benghazi e-mails, top US scholars gathered to testify in a little-watched congressional hearing Friday about the growing threat the use of drones in US airspace may pose to civil liberties.

They warned that unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the specter of a “significant new avenue for surveillance of American life,” as Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, characterized it for lawmakers Friday.

He would never have been cast to play the role of a bloody South American dictator in a Hollywood film. Soft spoken, deeply religious, rake thin and awkward, his lean face cut horizontally by an incongruously thick walrus mustache, his fellow Army officers nicknamed him affectionately “The Pink Panther.” The name stuck and was picked up by the press after General Jorge Rafael Videla overthrew Argentina‘s democratically-elected government in 1976 as head of a military junta that imposed a seven-year reign of terror in which some 20,000 Argentines were brutally murdered.

Venezuela on Friday released an opposition activist who had been jailed on accusations of inciting violence in the wake of President Nicolas Maduro's narrow election victory in April.

Retired General Antonio Rivero, who government critics described as the first political prisoner of Maduro's government, told a local television station he had been released after nearly three weeks in jail.

Rights activists visiting abandoned government prisons in the first Syrian city to come under rebel control have found torture devices and other evidence that detainees were abused there, Human Rights Watch said in a report Friday.

Raqqa, in eastern Syria, was overrun in late February by rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad. The rebels facilitated the New York-based group's access to facilities that had belonged to a government security agency and military intelligence in late April.