Theo Walcott's drawn-out contract standoff with Arsenal ended Friday with the signing of a lucrative new contract.

The England forward could have left the club for free at the end of the season, but has agreed to a three-and-a-half year deal that sees his salary rise by two-thirds to about 100,000 pounds ($160,000) a week.

A long-delayed restoration of the Colosseum's only intact internal passageway has yielded ancient traces of red, black and blue frescoes — as well as graffiti and drawings of phallic symbols — indicating that the arena where gladiators fought was far more colorful than previously thought.

Officials unveiled the discoveries Friday and said the passageway would be open to the public starting this summer, after the €80,000 ($100,000) restoration is completed.

A lawyer in Germany claims surgeons left up to 16 objects in her client's body after an operation for prostate cancer. She is seeking €80,000 ($106,216) plus costs for the family of the patient, who has since died. Surgical slips such as these are rare, but with millions of operations performed worldwide each year mistakes do sometimes occur.

According to Loyola University in Chicago, citing medical studies, some 1,500 patients in the United States have surgical objects accidentally left inside them after surgery each year. Most of the objects are sponges used to control patient bleeding during long operations. They can lead to pain, infections and other medical complications.

Novak Djokovic has heavily criticized Lance Armstrong's long-delayed doping admissions, saying the seven-time Tour de France winner is a disgrace to cycling and "should suffer for his lies."

At the same time, the No. 1-ranked man in tennis says the drug testing program in his sport is "good" but concedes that for the last six months he hasn't had a blood test which could detect illegal oxygen-boosting agents.

Maria Sharapova defeated Venus Williams 6-1, 6-3 in a lopsided match-up between Grand Slam champions on Friday night to reach the fourth round of the Australian Open.

Sharapova and Williams have 11 majors combined — four for the Russian, and seven for the Williams.

The Los Angeles Clippers hardly broke a sweat in cruising past free-falling Minnesota on Thursday, beating the Timberwolves 90-77 to move within half a game of the NBA lead.

Elsewhere, the Miami Heat repelled a late charge to hold off the Los Angeles Lakers, the New York Knicks beat the Detroit Pistons — in London — and the Milwaukee Bucks ended a lengthy run of outs in Phoenix by beating the Suns.

Lance Armstrong finally admitted it. He doped.

He was light on the details and didn't name names. He mused that he might not have been caught if not for his comeback in 2009. And he was certain his "fate was sealed" when longtime friend, training partner and trusted lieutenant George Hincapie, who was along for the ride on all seven of Armstrong's Tour de France wins from 1999-2005, was forced to give him up to anti-doping authorities.

A new video game based on Syria's civil war challenges players to make the hard choices facing the country's rebels. Is it better to negotiate peace with the regime of President Bashar Assad, for example, or dispatch jihadist fighters to kill pro-government thugs?

The British designer of "Endgame: Syria" says he hopes the game will inform people who might otherwise remain ignorant about the conflict.

Struggling Nokia Corp. is downsizing by more than 1,000 jobs, part of a wide-ranging plan to cut costs and streamline operations.

The Finnish firm says it will lay off 300 workers in its IT sector and transfer "some activities and up to 820 employees to strategic partners," India-based HCL Technologies and TATA Consultancy Services, which have operations in Finland.

A 14-year study of a nearly 1,000 elephants in Kenya shows an alarming death rate among older males — those with large, valuable tusks — and an acceleration in poaching deaths, the group Save The Elephants said Thursday.

The study said that in 2000 the region of Samburu had 38 known elephant males over 30 years of age. But 2011 only five of those original 38 were still alive. Almost half of the known females over 30 years also died during this period, at least half from illegal killings, the study found.