For a few surreal minutes, a mere 12 words on Twitter caused the world's mightiest stock market to tremble.

No sooner did hackers send a false Associated Press tweet reporting explosions at the White House on Tuesday than investors started dumping stocks — eventually unloading $134 billion worth.

An Indonesian player who punched a referee in the face has been banned for life by the country's football authority.

Pieter Rumaropen, a striker for Papua province club Persiwa Wamena, punched referee Muhaimin in the face after he awarded a penalty to Pelita Bandung Raya during a Super League match on Sunday in West Java's capital Bandung.

San Antonio, Oklahoma City and Indiana all took big strides toward the next stage of the NBA playoffs by winning their home games on Wednesday and taking 2-0 series leads.

San Antonio's Tony Parker had 28 points and seven assists as the Spurs beat the Los Angeles Lakers 102-91, Oklahoma City Thunder squandered a 15-point fourth-quarter lead but regrouped to edge the Houston Rockets 105-102 and Indiana's Paul George had his highest-scoring playoff game with 27 points to lead the Pacers to a 113-98 win over the Atlanta Hawks.

FIFA has extended bans for 23 players and one official previously found guilty of match-fixing in Lebanon to apply worldwide.

FIFA said the case involved "betting and corruption committed by some Lebanese officials and players during certain official matches of the Lebanese national team and other matches."

When Apple launched its iTunes music store a decade ago amid the ashes of Napster, the music industry — reeling from the effects of online piracy — was anxious to see how the new music service would shake out.

"The sky was falling, and iTunes provided a place where we were going to monetize music and in theory stem the tide of piracy. So, it was certainly a solution for the time," said Michael McDonald, who co-founded ATO Records with Dave Matthews and whose Mick Management roster includes John Mayer and Ray LaMontagne.

People magazine has named Gwyneth Paltrow as the World's Most Beautiful Woman for 2013.

The 40-year-old actress tops the magazine's annual list of the "World's Most Beautiful," announced Wednesday.

A group of independent experts has slammed Britain's cosmetic surgery industry for not protecting patients adequately and is calling for stricter controls in the aftermath of a breast implant scandal in Europe last year that left tens of thousands of women with cheap silicone implants prone to ruptures. A top British health official, meanwhile, signaled support for their recommendations.

In a review of how cosmetic procedures are regulated, the group said all skin fillers should be available by prescription only and that all practitioners — from surgeons to aestheticians who inject Botox — must be properly qualified. The expert group, commissioned by the U.K. Department of Health, also called for the creation of a registry of implants and other medical devices and an ombudsman for private health care, among other suggestions.

A lethal new strain of bird flu that emerged in China over the past month appears to jump more easily from birds to humans than the one that started killing people a decade ago, World Health Organization officials said Wednesday.

Scientists are watching the virus closely to see if it could spark a global pandemic but say there is little evidence so far to show the virus can spread easily from human to human.

If at first you don't succeed, wipe the slobber off and try again.

Just ask 4-year-old pup Huckleberry, who was crowned Monday as this year's "Beautiful Bulldog."

You can learn a lot from a zombie.

At least that's what a University of Michigan professor hopes her 31 graduate students took away from Tuesday's bizarre, albeit bloody, "zombie apocalypse." The classroom exercise was designed to get School of Public Health students thinking about what the appropriate response should be during a disaster.