At a time when Bayern Munich should be thinking about whether Lionel Messi is healthy enough to play, the new German champion has been rocked by a huge distraction before its Champions League semifinal against Barcelona.

Reports over the weekend that the club's president, Uli Hoeness, is under investigation for suspected tax evasion have dominated German headlines, nearly overshadowing the highly anticipated match.

LeBron James scored 27 points, finishing two assists shy of a triple-double, as the defending champion Heat picked up where they left off in the NBA playoffs a year ago, never trailing on the way to beating the Bucks 110-87 in Game 1 of an Eastern Conference first-round series on Sunday.

Ray Allen scored 20 off the bench, Dwyane Wade scored 16 and Chris Bosh added 15 for the Heat, who opened their title defense by holding Milwaukee to 42 percent shooting.

Venus Williams needed eight match points in the final game to beat Johanna Larsson 6-3, 7-5 and give the U.S. an insurmountable 3-1 lead against Sweden in the Fed Cup World Group Playoff.

It marked the first time that the 21st ranked Venus Williams, a former No. 1, has clinched a Fed Cup tie for the United States.

Takuma Sato became the first Japanese driver to win an IndyCar race when he crossed first in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach on Sunday.

The win came in Sato's 52nd career start, and was the first for A.J. Foyt Racing since Airton Dare won Kansas in 2002. Only the Texan wasn't on hand to make his first-ever trip to Long Beach's Victory Lane — a sciatic nerve that will require surgery forced him to watch the race on television at home.

Paris Saint-Germain closed in on the French league title Sunday with a 3-0 victory over Nice that restored its nine-point lead over Marseille.

With just five rounds left, the big-spending French club now looks unstoppable in its attempt to win a first league crown since 1994.

Don't take the cinnamon challenge. That's the advice from doctors in a new report about a dangerous prank depicted in popular YouTube videos which has led to hospitalizations and a surge in calls to U.S. poison centers.

The fad involves daring someone to swallow a spoonful of ground cinnamon in 60 seconds without water. But the spice is caustic, and trying to gulp it down can cause choking, throat irritation, breathing trouble and even collapsed lungs, the report said.

China slammed the human rights record of the United States in response to Washington's report on rights around the world, saying that U.S. military operations have infringed on rights abroad and that political donations at home have thwarted the country's democracy.

The report released Sunday in China — which defines human rights primarily in terms of improving living conditions for its 1.3 billion people— also cited gun violence in the U.S. among its examples of human rights violations, saying it was a serious threat to the lives and safety of America's citizens.

Jordan police have arrested eight Syrians on suspicion of inciting riots at a refugee camp near the Jordan-Syria border, a Jordanian security official said Sunday.

About 100 Syrian refugees threw stones at police on Friday for preventing some of them from sneaking out of their desert camp. Ten police officers were wounded, including two who remain in critical condition.

Five snowboarders were killed Saturday afternoon in a backcountry avalanche on Colorado's Loveland Pass, authorities said.

Clear Creek County Sheriff Don Krueger said in a statement that six snowboarders were caught in the slide. The condition of the lone survivor was not released.

As his train rolled across Germany in 1939, passing through small towns where swastikas fluttered from flagpoles, Tad Taube cowered in fear each time Nazi police entered his compartment and barked orders for his documents — papers that plainly identified him as an 8-year-old Jewish boy from Poland.

But the full terror of the war was still a few months off, and Taube got safely through Germany to France, and then by ship to the United States, making a narrow escape from the Holocaust and a passage into a bright American future of Hollywood, football, entrepreneurial success and philanthropy.