Frank Lampard's departure from Chelsea at the end of the season now appears certain.

Lampard's agent Steve Kutner has told British media that Chelsea has no intention of offering the veteran midfielder a new contract when his current deal expires at the end of the season.

Barcelona coach Tito Vilanova returned to the touchline on Sunday for his first game since undergoing throat surgery to remove a second tumor from a saliva gland.

Vilanova was back on Barcelona's bench alongside assistant Jordi Roura for the Catalan capital derby against Espanyol, guiding his side to a 4-0 thrashing of its crosstown rivals to maintain its nearly perfect Spanish league campaign.

Serie A leader Juventus was beaten 2-1 at home by 10-man Sampdoria and two other title contenders also lost Sunday, as the big Italian clubs struggled to get back into full gear after the holiday break.

Italy forward Antonio Di Natale scored twice to help Udinese beat 10-man Inter Milan 3-0, and Fiorentina lost 2-0 to Pescara for its first home defeat of the season.

Authorities in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas say a bacterial disease has killed five babies and sickened 41 others in a remote indigenous community that is experiencing a wave of intense cold and rains.

Chiapas' health department said Sunday in a statement that residents of Emiliano Zapata in the municipality of Yajalon have been urged to stay in their homes and avoid contact with others to prevent the spread of the bacteria that is causing the infection, which is characterized by coughing and fever. Authorities are looking into whether it is whooping cough.

Congressional leaders showed no signs of giving ground to resolve the next step in the financial crisis, with Democrats still talking about higher taxes on the wealthy and the Senate's top Republican suggesting that a crippling default on U.S. loans was possible unless there were significant cuts in government spending.

"It's a shame we have to use whatever leverage we have in Congress to get the president to deal with the biggest problem confronting our future, and that's our excessive spending," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday.

Iran's police chief says the Islamic Republic is developing new software to control social networking sites.

Gen. Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam was quoted in Iranian newspapers Saturday as saying the new software will prevent Iranians from being exposed to malicious content online while allowing users to enjoy the benefits of the Internet. He did not say when the software would be introduced.

Spaceport America officials are urging legislators to limit potential lawsuits from wealthy outer space tourists who take off from New Mexico, saying such a bill is crucial to the future of the project.

Legal experts, however, say there is no way to know whether the so-called informed consent laws will offer any protection to spacecraft operators and suppliers in the event something goes wrong.

The makers of Blekko believe they've built a great alternative to Google, but they're also realistic. They know their two-year-old Internet search engine won't ever supplant Google as the most popular place to search on laptop and desktop computers.

But Web surfing on tablet computers is a different matter, creating an opportunity that Blekko hopes to exploit with a new product called Izik — a search engine designed especially for Apple Inc.'s iPads and tablets running Google's Android software.

Julia Roberts and Mark Ruffalo will star in an HBO movie adaptation of "The Normal Heart," the play about the onset of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 1980s.

HBO said Friday that Ryan Murphy, maker of "Eat Pray Love" and the TV show "Glee," will direct the film.

The nation just suffered its worst year for whooping cough in nearly six decades, according to preliminary government figures.

Whooping cough ebbs and flows in multi-year cycles, and experts say 2012 appears to have reached a peak with 41,880 cases. Another factor: A vaccine used since the 90s doesn't last as long as the old one.