Vandals have badly damaged a rare 1,600-year-old mosaic in the northern Israeli city of Tiberias that formed the floor of an ancient synagogue, smashing parts to rubble and scrawling graffiti, antiquity officials say.

Experts suspect extremist Jews who object, sometimes violently, to excavations they claim involve ancient grave sites. There was no claim of responsibility. Police are investigating.

Maria Sharapova was nearly perfect in the first round of the French Open, winning all 12 games to produce a "double bagel."

The second-seeded Russian easily beat Alexandra Cadantu of Romania 6-0, 6-0 Tuesday, needing just 48 minutes to advance to the second round. She finished the match with 18 winners, while Cadantu had zero, but had to save three break points.

Injury doubts Danny Welbeck and Glen Johnson were both passed fit to play at Euro 2012 after being included in England's final 23-man squad for the tournament on Tuesday.

Manchester United striker Welbeck and Liverpool defender Johnson missed last Saturday's 1-0 friendly victory over Norway in Oslo because of lingering fitness issues.

The mysterious case of 11 Lebanese Shiites who were taken hostage in Syria last week is raising fears of renewed street battles in Beirut as Lebanon increasingly gets drawn into the swirling chaos next door.

The Syrian crisis already has spilled across the border into Lebanon over the past three weeks, sparking deadly violence in a country that remains deeply divided over the 15-month-old uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Japan's Renesas Electronics Corp. has reached a deal with electronics maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to have TSMC produce chips.

Renesas said Monday in a statement the two companies will work together to develop chips to cut costs while maintaining quality.

The match-fixing scandal that has rocked Italian soccer during the past year implicated the coach of Serie A champion Juventus on Monday and ensured at least one player won't be at the European Championship.

Police swept through the Italian national squad's training camp near Florence as part of a wide-ranging investigation into fixing that resulted in 14 arrests — including Lazio captain Stefano Mauri — to bring the total number arrested to about 50 since last year.

A young Georgia woman battling a flesh-eating disease could hardly believe it when she was able to speak Sunday for the first time since she was taken to an Augusta hospital more than three weeks ago, her father said Monday.

"Hello. Whoa. Wow, my mind is blown," were Aimee Copeland's first words Sunday morning to her sister and mother, her father said in a phone interview Monday with The Associated Press. Andy Copeland was in church at the time and had to wait until a later visitation time Sunday evening to hear his daughter's voice.

They've been away, but now they are — hopefully —buzzing back to their rightful place in the bucolic British countryside.

Around 50 short-haired bees were released into an English nature reserve Monday, some two decades after they were wiped out from most of rural Britain. Ecologists hope that with the support of farmers who have agreed to grow flowers and plants that help bees flourish they will zip across the country again.

Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As he received an honorary doctorate Sunday, Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro told Bates College graduates that despite his own lack of formal education, he made out OK.

During a 15-minute address that was by turns sincere and irreverent, De Niro drew a steady stream of laughter from the 463 graduating seniors and more than 2,000 onlookers at the private, liberal arts college's campus.