Memphis cruised to its fifth straight win and opened a small gap at the top of the NBA's Southwest Division with a dominant 99-69 win over Denver on Thursday.

The Grizzlies moved two games clear of Houston, which beat Dallas on Wednesday.

Serena Williams cut short a practice on the eve of the Australian Open final against Maria Sharapova due to a cold she's been battling for the past week.

The No. 1-ranked American was shown in footage on Australia's Channel 7 network coughing into a towel and blowing her nose before she abandoned the practice session on Friday.

Rapper Lil Wayne has had it with his record label. He's suing Cash Money Records for $51 million after claiming that it stiffed him for $8 million on a record he delivered last month.

In the federal lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Grammy Award-winning performer asked a Manhattan judge to nullify contracts he has held with the company since November 1998.

Russia deputy sports minister Yuri Nagornykh says his country's economic crisis is forcing athletes to scale back their training plans for next year's Olympics in Brazil.

Training camps abroad can be crucial in acclimatizing athletes for Rio de Janeiro's tropical conditions, but they are rapidly becoming unaffordable after the ruble lost almost half of its value against the U.S. dollar in the last 12 months.

Along with puppies and babies, celebrities are a Super Bowl advertising staple. And this year is no exception.

Using stars is a surefire way to grab attention during advertising's most competitive night, when a crowded field of 40-plus marketers vie for the attention of the more than 110 million viewers expected to tune in to the Super Bowl on Sunday.

Katy Perry says her American football championship Super Bowl halftime performance will make you "Roar" — with animals.

The singer told reporters at a press conference Thursday that her performance Sunday will include "a lion and sharks."

Charles H. Townes, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who helped create the laser that would revolutionize everything from medicine to manufacturing, has died. He was 99.

Townes had been in poor health before his death on the way to an Oakland hospital Tuesday, officials at the University of California, Berkeley, said.

An extensive survey of birds in Myanmar has revealed nearly two dozen not known to have existed in the country, including a large black seabird with a ballooning red neck sack and a tiny black and white falconet with a surprised, panda-like expression.

The Great Frigate and the Pied Falconet were among 20 previously undocumented birds spotted during a four-year field survey by the Bird and Nature Society, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Flora and Fauna International and several other bird-enthusiast associations, said Thet Zaw Naing, one of the surveyors.

Coral rely on algae for food and their survival.

So when the stress of warmer-than-average ocean temperatures prompted many of Hawaii's corals to expel algae last year — a phenomenon called bleaching because coral lose their color when they do this — many were worried they might die.

A baby caiman has found a new home at a Lithuanian zoo after its previous owner tried to sell it online, apparently upon realizing that the pet reptile he was raising in his bathroom wasn't a harmless lizard.

Officials at the Kaunas zoo said authorities confiscated the spectacled caiman from a student who had posted an online advertisement for a large lizard.