After four consecutive years of rain-postponed men’s finals, the U.S. Open is looking into changing its schedule as soon as next year and could become the first Grand Slam tennis tournament to switch permanently to a Monday finish.

Tournament director Jim Curley told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday that the U.S. Tennis Association started discussions last month with broadcaster CBS about finding a way to heed top players’ calls for a day off between the men’s semifinals and final.

The Italian club Virtus Bologna says “unexpected engagements” have made it impossible to sign Kobe Bryant(notes) this month, but both sides will keep working toward a deal in November.

Bologna President Claudio Sabatini told The Associated Press this month he had reached a tentative deal with Bryant’s agent or a 10-game contract worth more than $3 million.

Seeking an edge in the world of high-end smartphones, Motorola is bringing back the "Razr" name, once attached to the best-selling phone in the world.

The phone revealed Tuesday is thin, like the old Razr. Otherwise, the new Razr is a different breed from the folding "dumb" phone that made Motorola the second-largest phone maker in the world, before Apple Inc. shook up the industry with its iPhone in 2007.

A retired satellite is hurtling toward the atmosphere and pieces of it could crash into the Earth as early as Friday, the German Aerospace Center says.

Scientists are no longer able to communicate with the dead German satellite ROSAT, which orbits the earth every 90 minutes, and experts are not sure exactly where pieces of it could land.

A city prosecutor will ask a judge to find Lindsay Lohan in violation of her probation and order her to spend time in jail, a city attorney's spokesman said Tuesday.

The move is based on the actress' most recent probation report that states she was terminated from a women's shelter where a judge wanted her to serve most of her community service, city attorney's spokesman Frank Mateljan said.

President Barack Obama said he wanted to use his bus trip through rural North Carolina and Virginia to hear directly from the American people.

So he took questions on jobs, Social Security retirement benefits and education. Oh, and on pop star Justin Bieber.

Syrian state television on Wednesday aired a broadcast of what it said was a rally in support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the second city of Aleppo, Syria's economic hub, claiming it was attended by a million supporters of the embattled leader.

The pro-regime gathering in Aleppo comes a week after a similar rally in the capital, Damascus.

Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston might be closer friends than anyone realized.

Describing Aniston Monday night at Elle magazine's Women in Hollywood event, Witherspoon said, "you just want to get your nails done with her and you want to make out with her at the same time."

Europe's top court says patents cannot be filed on stem-cell research using cells from human embryos, a move many scientists say will harm future advances in medicine.

In a decision issued on Tuesday, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg wrote that a process that involves taking a stem cell from a human embryo, resulting in its destruction, cannot be patented.

A South Korean team led by disgraced stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk is claiming to have cloned coyotes for the first time.

The Sooam Biotech Research Foundation said Monday that eight coyotes were born in June as part of its efforts to clone various species of animals in cooperation with South Korea's Gyeonggi Province.