The descendants of African slaves donned masks and bright red costumes as they danced through the streets of this small Venezuelan town on Thursday for its annual commemoration of Corpus Cristi.

Young men beat drums and shook maracas as the "devils" paraded through the streets and people gathered to celebrate Corpus Cristi, a Roman Catholic holiday celebrating the transformation of the body and blood of Christ into bread and wine.

The invitation from Harvard University caught Oprah Winfrey at a low point. Her new TV network was struggling, branded a flop in the media, when Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust called last year to ask Winfrey to address 2013 graduates.

The request came "in the very moment when I had stopped succeeding," Winfrey recalled.

Nicki Minaj is following Mariah Carey out the door on "American Idol."

The hip-hop diva announced Thursday on Twitter that it is "time to focus on the music."

Two years ago, Novak Djokovic entered the French Open on a 39-match winning streak dating to the previous December.

Last year, he came to Paris having won 21 consecutive matches at Grand Slam tournaments.

A brilliant third quarter by LeBron James and the Miami Heat turned the game around and lifted the hosts to a 90-79 win over the Indiana Pacers on Thursday, taking a 3-2 lead in the NBA Eastern Conference finals.

James scored 16 of his 30 points in the third, helping to turn a six-point deficit into a 14-point lead and put the Heat within one win of a third-straight trip to the NBA Finals.

Paris Saint-Germain's sporting director Leonardo was suspended for nine months by the French league on Thursday for barging a referee just outside the tunnel following a home match — a punishment the club will appeal.

Leonardo was already provisionally suspended by the LFP for appearing to deliberately shoulder-barge Alexandre Castro after the French champions' 1-1 home draw against Valenciennes on May 5.

German police are warning rail travelers to be wary when using Deutsche Bahn's automatic ticket machines because criminals attempting to break into them may have left them filled with explosive gas.

Hesse state police spokesman Udo Buehler says since April criminals have successfully blown open 10 ticket machines by taping closed all holes, filling them with gas and igniting it. They then steal the money and blank train tickets.

For centuries, there's been no official French word for the sloppy Gallic export "to French kiss" — though that certainly hasn't stopped any citizen from doing so.

Now the oversight has been rectified.

Some Austrian firefighters didn't have to leave their station to deal with a recent alarm. The blaze came to them instead.

Fireman Roland Brandl says that colleagues were doing chores at the station in the town of Pregarten Wednesday when a car sped in with flames shooting from beneath it.

The player who used his phone to snap a photo of a ball mark during a French Open match has been fined $2,000 (about 1,500 euros).

Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine was cited for unsportsmanlike conduct for setting aside his racket and taking a picture of the spot in the red clay where a shot landed near a line in his 6-1, 6-4, 6-3 loss to seventh-seeded Richard Gasquet at Roland Garros.