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DeMarcus Cousins Reportedly Suffers Full Rupture of Achilles vs.Rockets

New Orleans Pelicans star DeMarcus Cousins was helped off the court during the fourth quarter of Friday's game against the Houston Rockets after reportedly tearing his suffering a full rupture of his Achilles, per Shams Charania of The Vertical.

"We're scared about it," head coach Alvin Gentry said, per Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle. I feel horrible for him. Everything that he's done and what he's made himself and the improvements in all areas that he's made, on and off the court, it's just been great. Our guys feel terrible."

The injury occurred when Cousins was attempting to get his own rebound after missing a free-throw attempt. He swatted at the ball, grabbed his leg and fell to the ground clutching his left leg. 

After being acquired by the Pelicans in a midseason trade last February, Cousins has paired nicely with Anthony Davis. The 27-year-old is averaging 25.4 points and 12.9 rebounds in 47 games this season entering Friday's game.

Depth is not a strength for the Pelicans as they seek a return to the playoffs following a two-year absence. Cousins and Davis both average a double-double and have carried the team to a 27-21 record after defeating the Rockets.

The Pelicans are particularly thin at center behind Cousins. Alexis Ajinca is likely out for the season after surgery in December to fix his right patellar tendon. Cheick Diallo is a power forward who can play the position with Davis shifting to center for head coach Alvin Gentry with Cousins likely out for the season.

The latest chapter in one of sports' all-time greatest rivalries tips off Tuesday as the Los Angeles Lakers host the Boston Celtics (10:30 p.m. ET, TNT).

The Celtics opened as 4.5-point favorites and now are laying five. The over-under, or total number of points Vegas thinks will be scored, is 208.5, down from 209.5.

Before picking either side, you need to read what SportsLine NBA expert Larry Hartstein -- who has put together a sizzling 18-9 run picking Celtics games -- has to say.

Last week, he told SportsLine readers to pick Philadelphia at +6 against the Celtics. He astutely noted Boston would struggle mightily with a sidelined Kyrie Irving. The result: The Celtics mustered only 80 points on 41 percent shooting and lost the game, 89-80.

Now, Hartstein, whose success has come thanks to his strong analytical background, has examined every matchup, every player and every trend for Celtics-Lakers and locked in his pick. His 18-9 record is on the line.

He knows the Lakers are 5-0 against the spread in their past five home games, while the Celtics are 1-4 ATS in the past five head-to-head matchups in Los Angeles.

Boston's best shot at covering the spread will be to exploit the paint against the undersized Lakers by getting Jayson Tatum and Al Horford driving to the hoop often. Horford nets about 13 points a game, but is shooting above 50 percent from the field.

But Los Angeles can cover the spread -- and win outright -- by pressuring the struggling Celtics into taking bad perimeter jumpers and igniting run-outs on missed shots. The Lakers took that approach in their previous game against the Knicks and got a slew of layups in a 127-107 rout.

So what side of the Celtics-Lakers do you need to be all over? Visit SportsLine now to see the strong point-spread pick by Larry Hartstein, who has absolutely crushed the NBA, and find out.

A 6.1 magnitude earthquake rattled Indonesia’s Java island, forcing evacuation of office and residential buildings in Jakarta and its suburbs.

The epicenter of the quake was near Lebak in Banten province at a depth of 10 kilometers, Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency said on Twitter. There were no immediate reports of any loss of lives from the impact of the quake, which initially measured 6.4 on the Richter scale, the agency said. The temblor was relatively shallow and triggered no aftershocks, it said.

More than 100 buildings were damaged on the outskirts of Jakarta, Kompas TV reported, citing Kaprawi, Banten head of the nation’s disaster mitigation agency.

Indonesia’s 17,000 islands are especially prone to earthquakes because the country straddles the Ring of Fire, an arc of fault lines and volcanoes that causes frequent seismic upheavals. Waves unleashed in 2004 by the undersea earthquake off the Sumatran coast caused the deadliest natural disaster this century, taking more than 220,000 lives and leaving more than 1.5 million homeless.

“We were immediately evacuated once the earthquake happened,” said Josua Pardede, chief economist at Bank Permata, who worked at the 28th floor of a building in Jakarta’s main Sudirman business district.

The impact of the midday quake was also felt in Bogor, Bandung, and several cities in central Java and Sumatra, the agency said. Trading at the Indonesia Stock Exchange was unaffected by the temblor, Rheza Andhika, a spokesman said in a text message. The benchmark Jakarta Composite Index traded near a record 6,565.310 by 2:31 p.m. local time.

MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Ten years after a stunning run to the fourth round of the Australian Open on her main draw debut, Taiwan's Hsieh Su-wei has enjoyed double good fortune at Melbourne Park this week.

The willow-thin 32-year-old from the steamy southern city of Kaohsiung will line up in the last 16 again after a second fairytale week at the year's first grand slam.

A marquee center court clash against the 2016 champion Angelique Kerber lies ahead, a formidable challenge for the world number 88.

Yet with the reigning Wimbledon champion Garbine Muguruza and former world number two Agnieszka Radwanska among the victims in her wake, doubles specialist Hsieh will head into a heaving Rod Laver Arena largely free of pressure.

"Don't talk about me beating her, it's more likely I'll get beaten to death!" Taiwan's number one joked in an interview with Reuters at Melbourne Park on Sunday.

"I think I've just got to try to be positive, take each game as it comes and fight it out to the end."

While tearing through the singles draw, Hsieh has had to juggle doubles commitments with China's Peng Shuai, a successful cross-strait partnership that has already yielded Wimbledon and French Open titles.

The pair have made the quarter-finals at Melbourne Park, an added sweetener for Hsieh, one of the rare tour competitors who plays double-handed on both sides.

Her unorthodox style and wealth of doubles experience has seemed to pay off in her singles game this week, conjuring improbable angles that have often tied her opponents in knots.

Her array of drop shots and slices can drive "people kind of crazy", former world number one Maria Sharapova once remarked after beating her at Wimbledon in 2012.

It's all based on feel rather than premeditation, said Hsieh, whose father had her play two-handed when she was starting out as a child.

It stuck through her junior days and remains her signature.

"When I was little I was very skinny, like this," she said, holding up her index finger.

"I was five when I started to play and I didn't have much power ... I couldn't grasp a racket with one hand properly so I went with two."

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

Hsieh was 22 when she made the fourth round of the 2008 Australian Open as a qualifier, eventually stopped by seven-times grand slam champion Justine Henin.

A decade on, she will be the oldest player competing in the last 16, a fact she acknowledged somewhat reluctantly.

"I look cute and young! I don't think too much about the age thing," she said.

"I was told I have the body of a 20-year-old because I haven't played all that much ... I've been quite fortunate without serious injuries as well.

"So I still think there is room for improvement."

A sharp increase in her ranking should help that late-blooming push, by putting her into more competitive tournaments.

Taiwan lacks a world class tennis program and facilities, said Hsieh, and she can hone her game with few elite compatriots.

Kerber, with her former world number one ranking and two grand slam titles, is quite a step up from Taiwan's number two, the 259th-ranked Chang Kai-chen.

Not that Hsieh will be guilty of over-analysing the German.

"She's a great player, it's fair to say she probably has the advantage with skill and power," said Hsieh.

"My advantage is that I am free-style.

"I don't really tend to go in with a game-plan, I kind of just do what comes naturally."

WASHINGTON — Much of the federal government officially shut down early Saturday morning after Senate Democrats, showing remarkable solidarity in the face of a clear political danger, blocked consideration of a stopgap spending measure to keep the government operating.

But senators from both parties were scrambling for a new deal to reopen the government quickly, possibly just hours after the midnight deadline passed.

With just 50 senators voting in favor, Senate Republican leaders fell well short of the 60 votes necessary to proceed on the spending measure, which had passed the House on Thursday. Five conservative state Democrats voted for the spending measure. Five Republicans voted against it, although one of those, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, did so for procedural reasons.

As the clock ticked toward midnight, when funding for the government was set to expire, senators huddled on the floor of the crowded Senate chamber, searching for some way forward.

But lawmakers simply ran out of time. The government shutdown was one year to the day after President Trump took office.


“Senate Democrats own the Schumer Shutdown,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in a statement. “Tonight, they put politics above our national security, military families, and our country’s ability to serve all Americans.”

Democrats countered that Republicans were responsible for the management of a government in their control.

“A Republican president occupies the White House, and Republicans hold the majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate,” said Representative Nita Lowey, Democrat of New York. “It is outrageous that, even with unified control of government, the majority could not chart a course toward keeping the government open, the most basic responsibility of Congress.”
The Senate’s vote, late Friday night, came after a day of budget brinkmanship in Washington that included a last-minute negotiating session between Mr. Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader. The 90-minute meeting produced progress, both men said, but no deal. Just hours later, it appeared to collapse.

The House-passed bill would fund government operations through Feb. 16, and extend funding by six years for the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, a provision intended to secure Democratic votes.

But Democrats were seeking concessions on other priorities, such as protecting young undocumented immigrants from deportation, increasing domestic spending, securing disaster aid for Puerto Rico and bolstering the government’s response to the opioid epidemic.

Federal agencies had prepared for the shutdown; on Thursday night, officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agency leaders to give their employees informal notice of who would be furloughed and who would not if funding lapsed.

Formal notifications are to be given as early as Saturday morning, budget office officials said, insisting on anonymity to brief reporters about the details of what the White House called “lapse planning and shutdown operations.”

The first episode of American Crime Story Season 2, titled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, wastes no time in linking spree killer Andrew Cunanan with his final and most famous victim: Gianni Versace. The series opens with a sweeping sequence showing Versace looking out majestically from the balcony of his Miami mansion while Cunanan sifts through a shabby, sand-logged backpack on the beach below—immediately establishing the “have” and “have not” in FX’s grim fable. 

The premiere, “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” is front-loaded with two encounters between Cunanan and Versace—one in the V.I.P. room of a nightclub, and one on the stage of the San Francisco Opera following a performance of Capriccio, for which Versace designed costumes.

Given Cunanan’s propensity for pathological lying and the dreamlike quality of these sequences, though, what is the truth about Cunanan and Versace’s relationship—and what are we meant to see as simply Cunanan’s delusion?

In 1997, Vanity Fair contributing editor Maureen Orth—who wrote the book on which The Assassination of Gianni Versace is based—was the first to report that Cunanan and Versace actually had met in San Francisco in 1990. Based on interviews with multiple witnesses to the interaction, Orth described how Cunanan and his friend Eli Gould met the fashion designer in the V.I.P. room of the nightclub Colossus.

The designer walked in with an entourage, including [Versace’s boyfriend] Antonio D’Amico and [Capriccio choreographer] Val Caniparoli, who quickly introduced him to a few people. After about fifteen minutes of chitchat and waves of young men eager to meet him, Versace began to survey the room. He noticed Andrew standing with Eli, cocked his head, and walked in their direction. “I know you,” he said to Andrew. “Lago di Como, no?” Versace was referring to the house he owned on Lake Como near the Swiss border. Reportedly he would often use the Lago di Como line when he wanted to strike up a conversation with someone.

Andrew was thrilled and Eli couldn’t believe it. “That’s right,” Andrew answered. “Thank you for remembering, Signore Versace.” Then Andrew introduced Eli to Versace, who made polite talk about whether they had seen the opera. (They hadn’t.) Eli and Andrew then drifted back down to the dance floor.

Meanwhile, another man—Doug Stubblefield—claimed to have seen Versace with Cunanan on a different occasion in San Francisco that fall. He says a chauffeured car containing the duo, plus socialite Harry de Wildt, pulled up alongside him as he was walking on Market Street one evening. “To show off, Andrew had the car come to the curb, and Andrew and Doug had a conversation,” writes Orth. But Harry de Wildt, “a sixtyish dandy . . . married to a younger, big-boned Hillman heiress,” denied that he ever met Cunanan, let alone traveled in a car with Versace and Cunanan. Tangling this complicated web of alleged interactions even further, another friend of Cunanan’s, Steven Gomer, told Orth that Cunanan had personally introduced him to de Wildt—and that the two seemed to go “back a long way.”
Gomer also told Orth that, on another evening, he ran into Cunanan at a different San Francisco haunt. Cunanan, who was wearing a tuxedo at the time, claimed to have just come from Capriccio, where he “was with Gianni Versace.” This stray remark seems to be the basis for the Versace scene in which Cunanan and Versace, surrounded by candelabras and sipping champagne, get to know each other on the stage of the San Francisco Opera. This moment, at least, has less of a basis in fact; as Versace co-star Ricky Martin tells Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast, “We’re not making a photo; we’re making a painting. We add color, etc.”

French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko is through to the third round at Melbourne Park, beating Duan Yingying 6-3, 3-6, 6-4 on Margaret Court Arena.

It is the second year in a row that the seventh-seeded Ostapenko has advanced to the third round here after losing in the first round in her first appearance in Australia in 2016.

Ostapenko is playing her first Grand Slam with her new coach, Australian David Taylor.
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga came from 5-2 down in the fifth set to beat Denis Shapovalov 3-6, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6 (4), 7-5 in a second-round match on Margaret Court Arena.
Tsonga broke the Canadian's serve for the second consecutive time to level the match at 5-5, including a full stretch sideways on break point on an attempted passing shot by Shapovalov.

Another of Tsonga's array of shots during the final set included one from between his legs for a winner.

He finally clinched it on his first match point, ending the 3 hour, 37-minute match.
Second-seeded Caroline Wozniacki has come from 5-1 down in the third set and saved two match points to beat Jana Fett 3-6, 6-2, 7-5 in the second round.

Fett is ranked 119th and was making her first appearance in the main singles draw of a Grand Slam tournament.

Wozniacki twice broke Fett's service while the Croatian player was serving for the match, including the two match points in the seventh game.

Wozniacki then broke Fett's service in the 11th game, helped by a Fett double-fault on break point and an unforced error by the Croatian which ended a 26-point rally.

She then held serve, clinching it on her first match point when Fett netted a backhand, giving her a six-game winning streak to end the match.

Glowing red lava rolled down the slopes of a Philippine volcano Tuesday morning as authorities maintained a warning of a possible hazardous eruption.

The lava was quietly flowing in some places but at times Mount Mayon was erupting like a fountain, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said. Lava had advanced up to 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) from the crater, and ash reached up to 2 kilometers and fell on nearby communities.

Nearly 15,000 people have fled the danger zone within 6 to 7 kilometers of Mayon, and the institute strongly advised people not to re-enter the area.

Several small pyroclastic flows were generated by fragments in the lava streams and not by an explosion from the crater vent, like occurred with Mount Pinatubo, said Renato Solidum, who heads the volcano institute. Pyroclastic flows are superheated gas and volcanic debris that can race down slopes and incinerate everything in their path, and are feared in a major eruption.

"The pyroclastic flows, there were several, were not generated by an explosion from the crater with lava, molten rocks and steam, shooting up the volcano then rolling down," Solidum said. "These were generated by lava fragments breaking off from the lava flow in the upper slopes."



He also said Mayon has not seen enough volcanic earthquakes of the type that would prompt scientists to raise the alert level to four, which would indicate an explosive eruption may be imminent. Emergency response officials previously said they may have to undertake forced evacuations if the alert is raised to four.

After steam explosions Saturday and lava rising in the crater on Sunday, the alert was raised to three on a scale of five, indicating a hazardous eruption is possible "within weeks or even days."

Mayon lies in coconut-growing Albay province about 340 kilometers (210 miles) southeast of Manila. With its near-perfect cone, Mayon is popular with climbers and tourists but has erupted about 50 times in the last 500 years, sometimes violently.

In 2013, an ash eruption killed five climbers who had ventured near the summit despite warnings. Mayon's first recorded eruption was in 1616 and the most destructive in 1814 killed 1,200 people and buried the town of Cagsawa in volcanic mud.

The Philippines lies in the so-called "Ring of Fire," a line of seismic faults surrounding the Pacific Ocean where earthquakes and volcanic activity are common.

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the northern Philippines exploded in one of the biggest volcanic eruptions of the 20th century, killing about 800 people.

Legazpi, Philippines (AP) -- More than 9,000 people have evacuated the area around the Philippines' most active volcano as lava flowed down its crater Monday in a gentle eruption that scientists warned could turn explosive.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology increased the alert level for Mount Mayon late Sunday to three on a scale of five, indicating an increased tendency toward a hazardous eruption.

Lava flowed at least half a kilometer (less than half a mile) down a gulley from the crater and on Monday morning, ash clouds appeared mid-slope, said Renato Solidum, head of the volcano institute.

Molten rocks and lava at Mayon's crater lit the night sky Sunday in an reddish-orange glow despite a shroud of thick clouds that covered the volcano, leaving spectators awed but sending thousands of residents into evacuation shelters.

Albay province emergency response official Cedric Daep said at least 9,000 people have been moved from high-risk areas in an ongoing evacuation. People in the danger area have put up huge white crosses in their neighborhoods, hoping to protect their lives and homes.

"It's risky if people will be left behind," Solidum said of villagers who stay to watch over their homes within a permanent danger zone around the volcano.

But if the institute raises the alert level further, indicating deadlier danger, villagers would have to leave areas near Mayon. The volcano lies in coconut-growing Albay province about 340 kilometers (210 miles) southeast of Manila.

Three steam-explosions since Saturday have spewed ash into nearby villages and may have breached solidified lava at the crater and caused lava to start flowing, Solidum said.

With its near-perfect cone, Mayon is popular with climbers and tourists but has erupted about 50 times in the last 500 years, sometimes violently.

On May 7, 2013, an ash eruption killed five climbers, including three Germans, who had ventured near the summit despite warnings of possible danger.

Experts fear a major eruption could trigger pyroclastic flows — superheated gas and volcanic debris that race down the slopes at high speeds, incinerating or vaporizing everything in their path. More extensive explosions of ash could drift toward nearby towns and cities, including Legazpi city, the provincial capital, about 9 miles (15 kilometers) away.

The bulletin sent Sunday night said a hazardous eruption was possible within weeks or even days. It said the glow in the crater signified the growth of a new lava dome and that the evacuation zone be enforced due to the dangers of falling rocks, landslides or a collapse of the dome.

Mayon's first recorded eruption was in 1616. The most destructive in 1814 killed 1,200 people and buried the town of Cagsawa in volcanic mud. The belfry of a Cagsawa church juts out of the ground in a reminder of Mayon's deadly fury that has become a tourist attraction.