Paris Saint-Germain's sporting director Leonardo was suspended for nine months by the French league on Thursday for barging a referee just outside the tunnel following a home match — a punishment the club will appeal.

Leonardo was already provisionally suspended by the LFP for appearing to deliberately shoulder-barge Alexandre Castro after the French champions' 1-1 home draw against Valenciennes on May 5.

German police are warning rail travelers to be wary when using Deutsche Bahn's automatic ticket machines because criminals attempting to break into them may have left them filled with explosive gas.

Hesse state police spokesman Udo Buehler says since April criminals have successfully blown open 10 ticket machines by taping closed all holes, filling them with gas and igniting it. They then steal the money and blank train tickets.

For centuries, there's been no official French word for the sloppy Gallic export "to French kiss" — though that certainly hasn't stopped any citizen from doing so.

Now the oversight has been rectified.

Some Austrian firefighters didn't have to leave their station to deal with a recent alarm. The blaze came to them instead.

Fireman Roland Brandl says that colleagues were doing chores at the station in the town of Pregarten Wednesday when a car sped in with flames shooting from beneath it.

The player who used his phone to snap a photo of a ball mark during a French Open match has been fined $2,000 (about 1,500 euros).

Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine was cited for unsportsmanlike conduct for setting aside his racket and taking a picture of the spot in the red clay where a shot landed near a line in his 6-1, 6-4, 6-3 loss to seventh-seeded Richard Gasquet at Roland Garros.

Iran last year boosted its support for global terrorism to levels not seen for two decades, the Obama administration said Thursday as it released its annual report on international trends in extremist violence. The report said the core elements of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan are headed for defeat but stressed that the network's various affiliates remain severe threats to the U.S.

The State Department's "Country Reports on Terrorism" for 2012 left unchanged the U.S. list of "state sponsors of terrorism." Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria remain on that blacklist, although Iran was singled out as the worst offender and Syria was taken to task for the ongoing brutal crackdown on opponents of President Bashar Assad's regime.

Less than four months before the IOC vote, the three cities vying for the 2020 Olympics took their campaign to a key international audience on Thursday — with each claiming to be the safest and most financially secure choice at a time of global uncertainty.

Officials from Istanbul, Madrid and Tokyo made presentations to the SportAccord conference in St. Petersburg, their first chance to pitch their bids in public to sports and Olympic officials.

Nestle SA, the world's biggest food and drink company, says it is boosting research to tackle the threat of ever-stronger strains of bacteria and germs in food manufacturing.

The Vevey, Switzerland-based company says it will initially boost research into several types of food-borne bacteria — particularly a dangerous strain of bacterium E. coli that infects people and pumps out a poison called Shiga toxin — and viruses Norovirus and Hepatitis A.

Microsoft is trying to fix what it got wrong with its radical makeover of Windows. It's making the operating system easier to navigate and enabling users to set up the software so it starts in a more familiar format designed for personal computers.

The revisions to Windows 8 will be released later this year. The free update, called Windows 8.1, represents Microsoft's concessions to long-time customers taken aback by the dramatic changes to an operating system that had become a staple in households and offices around the world during the past 20 years.

With a win over Malaga on Saturday, Barcelona can rob Real Madrid of its sole claim to the best single season in the history of the Spanish league.

Madrid set a record of reaching the 100-point mark en route to winning the title last season. And with 97 points heading into the final round, Barcelona can equal that milestone with a victory at Camp Nou.