DOHA (AP) ― Rafael Nadal struggled past Philipp Kohlschreiber while defending Qatar Open champion Roger Federer routed Nikolay Davydenko in their season openers on Tuesday. The second-ranked Nadal overcame Kohlschreiber of Germany 6-3, 6-7 (2), 6-3 in a match that lasted 2 1/2 hours. Federer, who lost badly to Nadal and No. 1-ranked Novak Djokovic over the weekend at an exhibition tournament in ...

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) ― LaMarcus Aldridge had 30 points and eight rebounds to help the Portland Trail Blazers beat the Oklahoma City Thunder 103-93 on Tuesday night. Wesley Matthews added 16 points for the Blazers, who held Oklahoma City to 34 percent shooting in the second half to push ahead on an off night for All-Stars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. Westbrook scored 22 points on 8-for-18 s...

PITTSBURGH (AP) ― Steelers coach Mike Tomlin knows safety Ryan Clark wants to play in Denver on Sunday when the Steelers take on the Broncos in the wild card round. It’s why Tomlin didn’t give Clark the option. The Steelers (12-4) will begin their quest for a second straight AFC title without Clark, who will be held out of the lineup as a precaution due to a sickle-cell trait that becomes aggra...

KAPALUA, Hawaii (AP) ― The list of who’s not at the season-opening Tournament of Champions reads more like a “Who’s Who.” Missing are three of the four major champions ― Charl Schwartzel, Darren Clarke and Rory McIlroy, who at 22 already is on the very short list of golfers capable of moving the needle no matter where they play. If that’s not enough, three of the four World Golf Championship wi...

DOHA (AP) ― David Beckham is set to stay with the Los Angeles Galaxy after turning down a chance to join Paris Saint-Germain, the French club said Tuesday. After weeks of negotiations with PSG, the 36-year-old midfielder and former England captain decided he doesn’t want to move his family from the United States. “David Beckham is not coming,” PSG president Nasser al-Khelaifi said at the Qatar ...

Mice bred to age too quickly seemed to have sipped from the fountain of youth after scientists injected them with stem cell-like progenitor cells derived from the muscle of young, healthy animals. Instead of becoming infirm and dying early as untreated mice did, animals that got the stem/progenitor cells improved their health and lived two to three times longer than expected. The findings by sc...

PRINCETON, N.J. (UPI) -- It turns out unusual crystals found in Russia weren't formed on Earth, researchers say, but rather came from outer space. The so-called quasicrystals, with an unusual structure somewhere between crystals and glass, had only been previously created in laboratories before they were discovered in Russia's Koryak Mountains in 2009, the BBC reported Tuesday. Now a team of re...

SEOUL, Jan. 4 (Yonhap) -- The rising number of female lawmakers has led to an expansion in their legislative activities, slowly introducing groundwork for gender equality at the male-dominated National Assembly, a government report showed on Wednesday. According to the report by the state-run Korean Women's Development Institute, the percentage of female lawmakers has been steadily rising from 5...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- Mitt Romney was locked in a dead heat with Rick Santorum in Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses, the opening contest in the campaign to pick a challenger to President Barack Obama. Romney, the longtime front-runner, and Santorum, whose campaign only recently gained momentum, each had about 25 percent of the vote with 99 percent of the state’s 1,774 precincts reportin...

Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts turned to John Sasso for help in getting a health- care bill through the state legislature, may want to solicit the Democratic operative’s advice again, this time on how to handle Ron Paul. Even before the voting started in Iowa on Jan. 3, Romney was a prohibitive favorite to win the Republican nomination, a 77.2 percent probability as of Dec. 31, ac...

MUNICH -- Interest rates for public debt within the eurozone have spread once again, just as they did before the introduction of the euro. Balance-of-payment disparities are steadily increasing. The sovereign-debt crisis is eating its way from the periphery to the core, and the exodus of capital is accelerating. Since the summer, 300 billion euros, in net terms, may well have fled from Italy and ...