Kobe Bryant has become the youngest player in NBA history to eclipse 30,000 career points and only the fifth overall to hit that mark.

Bryant entered the elite scoring club during the first half of the Los Angeles Lakers' game against the New Orleans Hornets.

Lionel Messi is a doubt for Barcelona's next Spanish league match at Real Betis on Sunday after being carried off the field on a stretcher late in a Champions League game.

With Barcelona already assured a first-place finish in its group, Messi entered Wednesday's game against Benfica with about 30 minutes to play. The Argentine needs only one goal to match Gerd Mueller's 40-year-old record of 85 goals in a single year.

Fernando Torres rediscovered his goal-scoring touch too late for Chelsea's Champions League hopes on Wednesday, with the English side becoming the first holders to exit at the group stage despite a 6-1 thrashing of FC Nordsjaelland.

On a bittersweet night 200 days after winning the competition, Torres ended a month-long goal drought, and Rafa Benitez claimed his first win in his fourth match in charge.

It may take a big spoonful of sugar to make this go down: Julie Andrews says that her four-octave voice is not coming back.

The Oscar and Tony Award-winning actress said in a recent interview that a botched operation to remove non-cancerous throat nodules in 1997 hasn't gotten better. It has permanently limited her range and her ability to hold notes.

A new study sets the stage for wider use of gene testing in early pregnancy. Scanning the genes of a fetus reveals far more about potential health risks than current prenatal testing does, say researchers who compared both methods in thousands of pregnancies in the U.S.

A surprisingly high number — 6 percent — of certain fetuses declared normal by conventional testing were found to have genetic abnormalities by gene scans, the study found. The gene flaws can cause anything from minor defects such as a club foot to more serious ones such as mental retardation, heart problems and fatal diseases.

Four crew members died and seven were missing in the icy waters of the North Sea, after a cargo ship collided with another vessel and sank off the Dutch coast Wednesday night, rescuers said.

"We can confirm that four bodies have been found, along with 13 people rescued alive," said Coast Guard spokesman Marcel Oldenburger.

Breast cancer patients taking the drug tamoxifen can cut their chances of having the disease come back or kill them if they stay on the pills for 10 years instead of five years as doctors recommend now, a major study finds.

The results could change treatment, especially for younger women. The findings are a surprise because earlier research suggested that taking the hormone-blocking drug for longer than five years didn't help and might even be harmful.

Maria Menendez, a 25-year-old caught in Spain's job-destroying economic crisis, would love to work in Germany as a veterinarian. Germany, facing an acute shortage of skilled workers, would love to have her.

A perfect match, it seems, but something's holding her back: She doesn't speak German.

Thanks to the election, socialism and capitalism are forever wed as Merriam-Webster's most looked-up words of 2012.

Traffic for the unlikely pair on the company's website about doubled this year from the year before as the health care debate heated up and discussion intensified over "American capitalism" versus "European socialism," said the editor at large, Peter Sokolowski.

Finland's economy has slipped into recession with a 0.1 percent drop in gross domestic product in the third quarter from the previous three months, as the export-dependent country continues to suffer from a drop in demand among European trading partners.

Statistics Finland said Wednesday economic output fell 1.1 percent in the second quarter. That puts Finland in recession, commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of quarterly economic contraction.