Live Coverage

The Lakers' first signature victory of the season, a 93-83 victory over the Miami Heat, had Kobe Bryant's imprint all over it. The masked Bryant scored 33 points, including several fourth-quarter jumpers that kept the Miami Heat from making the game uncomfortably close on Sunday at Staples Center. Making his performance all the more impressive was that it came against one of the NBA's top teams, albeit one missing power forward Chris Bosh for the entire game and Dwyane Wade for the final 5 minutes 14 seconds after the All-Star guard fouled out following a flurry of four fouls in rapid-fire succession.

UFC 144 takes place from Saitama Super Arena in Japan Saturday night. It is the UFC's first show in Japan since 1999. The event is headlined by a lightweight title bout between champion Frank Edgar and challenger Ben Henderson. Live results will update throughout the evening. Tiequan Zhang vs. Issei Tamura Zhang is a rare Chinese UFC fighter, with a 1-1 UFC record. Tamura, a late replacement, sports a 6-2 MMA record. Round 1.  Tamura lands a pair of hard punches at the start of the round and seems to have Zhang in great trouble.

Eight Republican candidates for president gather today at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley for a 105-minute debate that is likely to focus on the race's new front-runner, Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Perry, who vaulted into the lead among GOP candidates within a month of his official entrance into the race, is making his debate debut. Among the others onstage will be former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the previous front-runner, and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, the "tea party" favorite before Perry joined the race last month.

9:23 p.m. — The premise is to slide down a 60-foot ramp on a skateboard, then jump a 50-foot gap onto a 20-foot rail. The challenge is to land on the other side of that rail, and then to continue up a 27-foot quarterpipe and perform a trick. No problem, right? Wrong. The challenge proved nearly too much for the six men competing in the skateboard big air rail jam, Saturday's last X-Games event. In a 30-minute jam format, the skaters went through a total of 63 runs, and landed just 10. That means the skaters failed to clear the rail in 53 of their attempts.

Four Canadian television networks will provide live coverage of the announcement of Canada's Olympic hockey team Wednesday, and they'll be joined by the FAN radio network and live streaming on websites. The nationally circulated Globe and Mail newspaper plans to publish a 16-page supplement analyzing the roster Thursday. You think Canada is excited about the Vancouver Games? It is, and with good reason. Not only does the host country want to win at the game it claims to have invented, this could be the last Olympics to include NHL players.

Just as in life, the King of Pop in death is poised to command nearly unprecedented media coverage. Six days before he was to begin a 50-date comeback tour in London, Michael Jackson will instead be eulogized at a massive memorial service today at Staples Center. All the major networks and a host of cable news and entertainment channels, including CNN, MSNBC, E! Entertainment, TV Guide Network and TV One, plan to carry the event live at 10 a.m.

As many as 2 million people are expected to descend on the National Mall on Tuesday to witness the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, but most of the country will experience the event on television. The broadcast and cable networks will begin coverage well before the start of the swearing-in ceremony, at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time. Reporting will begin at dawn in Washington and continue on most networks into the night. All times listed are PST.

Local television news devoted nearly continuous live coverage throughout much of Monday to the fires raging across seven Southern California counties as the crisis led to the cancellation of most regular daytime programming, cut into advertising revenues and pushed newsrooms to their limits.

MADRID -- State-run television has quietly yanked live coverage of bullfighting from its programming, ending a decades-old tradition of showcasing the national pastime out of concern that the deadly duel between matador and beast is too violent for children. Televisión Española's first broadcast in 1948 was a bullfight in Madrid.

People who can't get enough C-SPAN are getting more chances to watch legislative coverage from the comfort of their couches. At a time when news media coverage of most state legislatures is increasingly sparse, there are now more than 20 stations across the country offering gavel-to-gavel legislative coverage. That's up from a handful in the 1990s. Only about a dozen offer full broadcast slates. Others offer limited, part-time programming.