Defending champions Novak Djokovic and Victoria Azarenka have been confirmed as the top seeds for the Australian Open starting next week.

Australian Open organizers stuck closely to the latest rankings to seed 32 players for each of the men's and women's draws.

Oklahoma City Thunder reclaimed the overall NBA lead with a 104-92 victory over the Toronto Raptors on Sunday, starting a challenging run of road games in winning style.

Elsewhere, high-flying Miami and Memphis posted wins while the Los Angeles Lakers' woes deepened with another home defeat.

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.