Having polished off their second subpar opponent in a row, the Los Angeles Lakers are turning their attention to a sore spot — the road.
Kobe Bryant scored 24 points, Andrew Bynum added 20, and the Lakers beat slumping Charlotte 106-73 on Tuesday night in their final home game before beginning their annual Grammy trip on Friday at Denver.

Former top-ranked Caroline Wozniacki has fired her coach Ricardo Sanchez of Spain after just two months.
Wozniacki's father Piotr told Wednesday's edition of the Ekstra Bladet that his daughter didn't get "new impulses" from the cooperation with Sanchez.

Wayne Bridge will look to revive his career at Sunderland after joining the northeast team on loan from Premier League leader Manchester City until the end of the season.
The 31-year-old Bridge has played one match for City this season — in the League Cup against Birmingham in September — after falling behind fellow left backs Gael Clichy and Aleksandar Kolarov in the pecking order.

A professor from American University in Cairo says discovery of prostate cancer in a 2,200-year-old mummy indicates the disease was caused by genetics, not environment.
The genetics-environment question is key to understanding cancer.

Thirty people, most of them homeless, have died of hypothermia in recent days in Ukraine, part of a surge of deaths across eastern Europe as the region grapples with an unusually severe cold spell.
In all, at least 54 people have died from the cold in Europe over the last week.

Dwyane Wade's role as captain of the Miami Heat comes with certain privileges. For example, he can occasionally shake off calls from Heat coach Erik Spoelstra.
And no one complained, either.

Carlos Tevez has appealed to the Premier League against a six-week fine imposed by Manchester City for his continued absence from the club.
City found Tevez guilty on December 22 of gross misconduct for traveling without permission to his native Argentina in November, where he remains.

Google, Facebook and other big tech companies are jointly designing a system for combating email scams known as phishing.
Such scams try to trick people into giving away passwords and other personal information by sending emails that look as if they come from a legitimate bank, retailer or other business. When Bank of America customers see emails that appear to come from the bank, they might click on a link that takes them to a fake site mimicking the real Bank of America's. There, they might enter personal details, which scam artists can capture and use for fraud.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo sought to calm the global outrage over the company's new country-by-country censorship policy, complaining in part that the issue is being treated with the same kind of shorthand that has made Twitter popular.
Speaking at the All Things D conference on Monday, Costolo repeated the company's justification for the policy change it announced last week: By taking down tweets only in the country where Twitter believes they may have violated local laws, it is making sure the maximum 140-character-long messages are still available to the rest of the world.

It was completed in 1930, a masterpiece of Modernism by legendary German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
But Villa Tugendhat's early history was rocked by the turbulence of the 20th Century: The Nazis seized it, then came World War II bombardments that smashed its windows. When the Soviet troops liberated Czechoslovakia, living space became a large stable. It has languished in disrepair ever since.
