For a team that won it all in spectacular fashion last season, Barcelona begins the Spanish league plagued by doubts few could have imagined three months ago.

A shaky back line, sloppy passes, and even a self-destructive outburst from the team's best defender have given coach Luis Enrique more than enough to muddle over before Sunday's league opener at Athletic Bilbao.

Veteran actress Maggie Kirkpatrick, who played a violent and sadistic warden nicknamed "The Freak" in a cult Australian soap opera set in a women's prison, was convicted by a magistrate on Thursday of molesting a 14-year-old psychiatric hospital patient in her home more than 30 years ago.

The series was known as "Prisoner" in Australia, and "Prisoner: Cell Block H" or "Caged Women" overseas. It ran from 1979 to 1986.

Tim Duncan has given up millions in salary to give the San Antonio Spurs the cap space needed to re-sign teammates and add players such as LaMarcus Aldridge.

And Duncan has deferred offensively to teammates like Tony Parker and Kawhi Leonard despite averaging 19.5 points over his 18-year career.

The drifting smoke from forest fires sometimes makes it difficult for marathoner Heather Lieberg to take a deep breath during her afternoon training runs in the hills of Montana.

Even on days when the local advisory lists the air quality as "unhealthy for sensitive groups," Lieberg is out there chugging away through the hazy and hot conditions.

Chris Froome will be racing both for and against history when the Spanish Vuelta starts Saturday.

The Tour de France champion is aiming to become the third cyclist to win both the Tour and the Vuelta in the same season, after Jacques Anquetil (1963) and Bernard Hinault (1978).

Serena Williams pumped her fist after each important point and screamed as she smacked another emphatic shot. The defending Cincinnati champion wasn't going to ease into the tournament.

Williams put a lot of emotion into her opening match at the Western & Southern Open on Wednesday, a 7-5, 6-3 victory over Tsvetana Pironkova that made her the first of the top seeds to advance.

Valencia is close to completing its return to the Champions League after beating Monaco 3-1 Wednesday in their first leg playoff on a night full of late goals by teams fighting to reach the lucrative group stage of Europe's top club competition.

Sofiane Feghouli led two-time former finalist Valencia by assisting Rodrigo Moreno's opener and netting a third goal with four minutes to play to put his Spanish team in a strong position to advance.

Police in western Germany are looking for thieves who broke into a store selling alcohol and stole the caps off 1,200 bottles of beer — presumably to collect points for a prize contest — yet left the suds themselves untouched.

Essen police said Tuesday the thieves broke into the shop in Muelheim an der Ruhr overnight Sunday and stole the caps from the popular Koenig Pilsner. They kept those with points toward prizes like Bose speakers or a Black & Decker cordless drill, left dozens of "good luck try again" caps on the ground and didn't drink a single beer.

Scientists say they have found rare evidence of a prehistoric massacre in Europe after discovering a 7,000-year-old mass grave with skeletal remains from some of the continent's first farmers bearing terrible wounds.

Archaeologists who painstakingly examined the bones of some 26 men, women and children buried in the Stone Age grave site at Schoeneck-Kilianstaedten, near Frankfurt, say they found blunt force marks to the head, arrow wounds and deliberate efforts to smash at least half of the victims' shins — either to stop them from running away or as a grim message to survivors.

The U.S. lobster population has crashed to the lowest levels on record in southern New England region while climbing to heights never before seen in the cold waters off Maine and other northern reaches — a geographic shift that scientists attribute in large part to the warming of the ocean.

The trend is driving lobstermen in Connecticut and Rhode Island out of business, ending a centuries-old way of life.