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SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - Nearly three years after the formation of a partnership designed with the sole purpose of winning multiple NBA championships, the Miami Heat's 'Big Three' - LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh - are on the cusp of a second Finals letdown.

The All Star trio have been unable to prevent Miami falling 3-2 behind to the San Antonio Spurs in the best-of-seven championship series with the next two games scheduled for South Florida on Tuesday and Thursday.

"I have to come up big, for sure, in Game Six," James, who is the cornerstone of the Heat's success, told reporters after Miami's 114-104 loss on Sunday. "But I believe we all have to play at a high level in order to keep the series going."

The trio reached the NBA Finals in their first season together but were upset by the Dallas Mavericks. The following year they dispatched the Oklahoma City Thunder in five games.

After a sluggish start to the 2013 NBA Finals, they finally found their groove in a Game Four victory last week but were unable to carry that momentum into the fifth game of the series.

"We kept fighting, we kept feeling like we had a chance," Wade said after Sunday's game, which Miami never led despite getting close on several occasions.

"This was a game that it was like we could steal it. But they continued to make shots. Credit to them."

Capping what has been their best season together with a second championship could mark the beginnings of a dynasty, but a loss could put an ugly stain on their legacy.

After all, Miami opened the 2012-13 campaign as overwhelming favorites and enjoyed a franchise-record 66-win regular season which included a stunning 27-game winning streak that was the second longest in NBA history.

The series now shifts to Miami where the Heat will have to do something they have been unable to do in nearly a month - win consecutive games. Miami have alternated wins and losses over their last 12 playoff games.

"We're looking forward to going home, and that's all the talk we had in the locker room is, can we put together our best game for Game Six?" said Miami coach Erik Spoelstra, whose team went 37-4 at home in the regular season and 8-3 in the playoffs. "Guys are looking forward to playing in front of our fans."

Few expected the Heat to be pushed to the brink, especially against a Spurs team that were considered by many too old to contend for a title when the season began.

But San Antonio, in the Finals for the first time since winning a fourth championship in 2007, has been getting age-defying performances from its veterans while younger players like Danny Green, Gary Neal and Kawhi Leonard are causing the Heat headaches.

"Me being one of the leaders of this team, I do put a lot of pressure on myself to force a Game Seven, and I look forward to the challenge," said James.

"But our next challenge, biggest challenge, will be Tuesday night. We have an opportunity on our home floor with our home fans to keep the series going, and we look forward to it."

(Editing by Peter Rutherford)

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Two decades might seem like the blink of a lizard's eye on top of 65 million years, but the science and speculations of "" have evolved significantly since Steven Spielberg's beasts first shook movie theaters.

Here are seven ways the science ofand company has changed since audiences first heard, "Welcome to Jurassic Park!"

1. Plumed T. rex?

If filmed today, the science suggests many of "Jurassic Park" dinos would look a bit more Tweety Bird than Terrible Lizard. The first film hewed to the long-standing image of dinosaurs as big, scaly reptiles. Subsequent research, however, has provided more and more evidence that many meat-eating dinosaurs sported plumage. A year ago, scientists in China Yutyrannis huali a slightly smaller relative of T. rex. Velociraptors also , confirmed by the discovery of quill knobs, a type of feather anchor, on raptor arm bones in 2007.

This was suspected even at the time of the 1997 sequel, "The Lost World," however. Spielberg made a gesture toward the science by putting a few feathers on his speedy killers in that film, though not as many as the paleontologists requested. If he had, the raptors would have looked too different from the first film, said Jack Horner, a renowned paleontologist at Montana State University and a technical adviser on all the "Jurassic Park" films. Next year's fourth "Jurassic Park" film, however, will , according to reports despite what experts say.

2. A mammoth boost to cloning?

Back when "Jurassic Park" debuted, science was still three years away from the arrival of the sheep named "Dolly," , and a landmark in cloning technology. In 2001, scientists replicated the first endangered species "Noah" the guar, a type of threatened ox. Since then, cloning and genetic technologies have continued to advance, with some researchers turning their attention to extinct species. Now, new genetic tools, and well-preserved specimens, could make one "Jurassic Park"-esque feat a reality: . Last year, a South Korean and Russian team announced their goal of doing just that. []

In the film, a fictional educational cartoon credits "thinking machine supercomputers and gene sequencers" with reading dinosaur DNA. But no technology in 1993 could have done that kind of massive genetic analysis. In 2005, however, the 454 Life Science Genome Sequencer made it possible to do just the sort of large-scale reads and analyses shown in the film. "The change in technology really sparked our ability to deep sequence these extinct species," said Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University in Ontario who is studying mammoth DNA. With well-preserved mammoth tissue unearthed from the icebox of Siberia and the Yukon, Poinar and colleagues have sequenced the DNA of the extinct elephant relatives. "We completely underestimated how long it would take before we could sequence those genomes," Poinar told LiveScience. "Some thought we never would."

Cloning a mammoth is now conceivable, Poinar said. The film correctly predicted the need to repair ancient DNA, which degrades over time, and use modern relatives to bring extinct babies to term. In "Jurassic Park," scientists plugged holes in degraded dino DNA with substitutes from frogs, incubating the extinct animals' embryos in emu and ostrich eggs. Similarly, current or near-current science could repair the fragmented genetic material of mammoths using elephant templates, and implant an embryo in an elephant womb. Ensuring that the elephant could bring a mammoth embryo to term poses the next challenge, but much of the science is in place such as synthesizing long sequences of DNA and modifying cells to be , which can turn into any cell in the body, Poinar said. He predicts a cloned mammoth within 10 to 50 years. "We're closer and closer than we ever expected to be," he said. "People with enough money will absolutely do it."

3. Orange Dino? Blue Dino?

In April, scientists made the remarkable discovery of intact dinosaur skin, which could reveal perhaps far beyond the green and brown traditionally portrayed. Though three other samples of dinosaur skin have been discovered, scientists are now, for the first time, using particle accelerators to probe the samples for pigments, said Mauricio Barbi, a physicist at the University of Regina, who discovered and is investigating the sample. The test could reveal the shapes of cell structures called melanosomes, and different shapes are associated with different pigments, Barbi said. The research has already shown high concentrations of copper and zinc, suggestive of the presence of melanin, a common pigment that all melanosomes contain. []

Even without direct skin analysis, current evidence says dinosaurs used up more of the crayon box than historically assumed. Since the early 1990s, the evidence linking the evolutionary branches of dinosaurs and birds (as well as lizards) has gotten all the more convincing. Birds and lizards show a lot of colors, so scientists would expect dinosaurs to do so, as well, said Horner. Even at the time of the first "Jurassic Park," Horner argued for brighter beasts. But Spielberg wanted more frightening, dragonlike shades. "I wanted them more colorful," Horner said. "Steven wanted them scary."

4. Birds descended from dinos? Yawn

The scientists of "Jurassic Park" argue energetically . In the film, paleontologist Alan Grant excitedly notes the swift-running Gallimimus pack moving together "like a flock of birds evading a predator!" But by now, the family ties between birds and dinosaurs are pretty much conventional wisdom.

Back in 1993, though, bird-dino relationships were a sufficiently new idea, and contentious enough, to serve as both a point of scientific debate and a sort of redemptive conclusion; even though they ate many of his friends, the dinosaurs confirmed Grant's ideas about bird descent. The evidence linking dinosaurs to birds in 1993 came from skeletal resemblances, mostly compiled in the 1980s. "Back then, it was based solely on bone structure," said Luis Chiappe, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum at Los Angeles who specializes in dinosaur evolution. "In the last 20 years, we've had so many lines of evidence telling us the same thing." Feathered dinosaurs, commonalities among dinosaur peepers and bird eyes, and similarly structured eggs all point to dinosaur-to-bird descent, Chiappe added. By estimating cell sizes based on spaces in bones, scientists have even calculated that theropod dinosaurs (those most closely related to birds) had genomes of approximately the same, small size as birds.

As a result, it's much harder now to deny that birds came from T. rex and kin. "Today, you would have to explain how they're so similar in so many ways," Chiappe said.

5. Warm and cuddly creatures

In a similar redemption of the "Jurassic Park" scientists' theories, the reborn dinosaurs appear warm-blooded, notably demonstrated when the Velociraptor's breath steams up a window. Scientists' early perception of dinosaurs as big crocodiles also portrayed them as cold-blooded, slow-moving brutes at about the same time. Evidence has piled up in this area, too, since 1993, Horner said, though it was fairly established back then, too. "For the last 20 years, we've known dinosaurs were warm-blooded," Horner said. "We've just been getting more and more facts." The vasculature (number of blood vessels, revealed by microscopy of bone structure) and growth rates ofrequired warm innards, Horner said. "There's nothing alive today that has the vasculature of a dinosaur [but] that is cold-blooded." []

6. T. rex the scavenger?

In the last couple of years, a12-year study detailed inhelped downgrade T. rex from terrifying hunter, capable of chasing down Jeeps filled with mathematicians and children, to a big lug rummaging through the garbage. The research compared relative numbers of T. rex individuals and their purported prey (duck-billed dinosaurs), finding far too many T. rexes for the enormous beasts to be top-level predators. An environment can support about the same number of scavengers, like hyenas, as prey, but far fewer high-level predators, like lions. The conclusion: T. rex doesn't want to hunt, he wants to be fed.

Horner, in fact, first probed the theory of T. rex as scavenger around the time "Jurassic Park" premiered. "I was struck by the idea that the [T. rex] morphology was almost completely the opposite of Velociraptor," Horner said. T. rex had a big head; "big, bone-crushing teeth," and those famously tiny forearms, Horner said. All of this suggested "the Tyrant Lizard King" rummaged for its meat, crunching up carcasses instead of running after prey. "If it hunted at all, it probably just targeted weak, sick or dead animals," Horner said. The movies, unsurprisingly, depict T. rex as a much more active predator.

7. Bad news: DNA decay

If the demotion of T. rex from king to peasantry weren't enough, perhaps the cruelest blow to dino lovers came last year, when researchers determined that "Jurassic Park" would be impossible. The reason? Too much time has passed to recover the terrible lizards' DNA from the blood of petrified insects, as the movie portrays: The molecules would have decayed long ago.Researchers in Australia last year made the first-ever , or the time for half of a DNA molecule's bonds to break. By the researchers' calculations, all DNA would disappear, "even under the best scenarios, in 6-7 million years," researcher Mike Bunce, from Murdoch University's Ancient DNA lab in Perth, wrote in an email to LiveScience. That means cloners could still use DNA from the relatively recent woolly mammoth, which survived until a few thousand years ago. But the last T. rex roared 65 million years in the past, and most dinosaurs disappeared much earlier.

"Jurassic Park 4" will go on, of course, sweeping this little scientific hang-up under Hollywood's red carpet. As Horner said, "My job was to make the dinosaurs look as good as they could. Steven turned them into actors." And actors can fib a little.

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WASHINGTON - Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin criticized the Obama administration's decision to supply weapons to the rebels in the civil war in Syria today, arguing that the U.S. should "Let Allah sort it out" until there is a stronger leader in the White House.

"Militarily, where is our commander in chief? We're talking now more new interventions. I say until we know what we're doing, until we have a commander in chief who knows what he's doing, well, let these radical Islamic countries who aren't even respecting basic human rights, where both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line, 'Allah Akbar,' I say until we have someone who knows what they're doing, I say let Allah sort it out," Palin said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference.

Earlier this week, the White House announced it confirmed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime hasin the fight against its own people, and the Obama administration will provide more "direct support" to the Syrian opposition since the president's "red line" has been crossed.

The White House said today that Obama discussed the civil war in Syria with European leaders in a teleconference Friday, and the issue is expected to dominate much of the conversation at the G-8 Summit in Northern Ireland next week.

Palin, speaking at the conclusion of the three-day Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference, also took a swipe at another speaker at the conservative forum, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who argued Friday that one of the reasons to support the Senate's immigration reform plan is because

"I think it's kind of dangerous territory, territory to want to debate this whole one race's fertility rate over another, and I say this from someone who's kind of fertile herself," Palin said. "I don't think that's where we want to go in deciding how will we incentivize the hardworking responsible families who want to live in the light, follow the law, become Americans, versus those whose very first act on our soil is to break the law? There are different ways that we can debate this."

As she warned the conservative crowd of "tyranny" in government, Palin said that the recent scandals involving the Internal Revenue Service and the National Security Agency make the country feel "so Orwellian around here, you know, '1984.'"

Calling Washington, D.C. "one hot mess," Palin also doled out some advice to Congress, who she said should follow the lead of a young senator whom she backed in his 2012 race - Texas. Sen. Ted Cruz.

"You know what I wish Congress would do? If they would just for one week perhaps, put themselves on Cruz control, on Ted Cruz control," Palin said. "Just for a week and let's see where things go. I think we'd see some solutions."

Though she has often served as the butt of jokes on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," Palin joked about the frequency with which the comedy show makes fun of her, saying she's provided an ample amount of jokes and jobs for comedians.

"They should think of me as a friend. For a while there, I was providing more job security for the Tina Feys of the world and doing more for those employment numbers than Obama's ever done," Palin said.

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Sure,like the idea of reforming the tax code — something some Republicans want to do. But young people want to reform the code so rich people pay more taxes, College Republicans found, "as they perceived that the wealthy were able to take advantage of loopholes to ensure they paid less in taxes than young (and not particularly wealthy) people do." What about the conservative case that cutting rich people's taxes help everyone? Young people don't buy it. "The challenge for Republicans is to connect lower (or simpler) taxes to economic growth, a link that is not currently strong in the minds of many young voters," the report says. A Spring 2012 Harvard Institute of Politics survey found that only 39 percent agreed that "cutting taxes is an effective way to increase economic growth."

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And young voters don't get excited when candidates bash "big government." The report says "big government" is not much of a motivator, even though young voters support cutting spending. They don't believe that cutting government will grow jobs. And they don't want to shrink big government just for the sake of shrinking it. And young voters are picky about what gets shrunk:

Overwhelmingly, respondents in the focus groups thought the problem was not just that too much money was being spent, but rather that it was being spent on the wrong things. (The groups were clear that they felt education deserved more, not less, funding.) Indeed, a large number of respondents pointed to the defense budget as the place where cuts should start.

The RNC's autopsy suggested the party . Some conservatives have argued the party needs to go further, and the College Republicans report offers some evidence for that. In 2012, the entire Republican National Convention was focused on the theme "You built that" — an obscure Twitter joke about the time President Obama said companies' successes were partly due to community investment ("You didn't build that"). Using a Twitter joke was a great way to get young people to pay attention to the party's message. Now they have to figure out how to make that message on young people find appealing.

(Reuters) - The 21-year-old son of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu was arrested and charged on Thursday with drunken driving and hit and run after he allegedly struck a pedestrian while driving the wrong way down Bourbon Street in New Orleans, police said.

Connor Snellings was taken into custody at about 3 a.m. local time at the corner of Bourbon and St. Louis streets after he failed a field sobriety test, according to the New Orleans Police Department.

Police said in a statement that a breathalyzer given to Snellings showed his blood alcohol content was 0.211, more than twice the legal limit in Louisiana.

"We love our son wholeheartedly, but we are extremely disappointed by his irresponsible actions last night," Landrieu, a Democrat, said Thursday in a phone interview with the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans. "These actions have serious consequences both at home and in our legal system."

Police said the unnamed pedestrian he is accused of striking with his vehicle sustained minor injuries.

Snellings also was booked for driving the wrong way on a one-way street, failure to maintain control of a vehicle and possession of alcohol in a vehicle, according to police.

A passenger in Snellings' vehicle was charged with having an open container in a vehicle and public intoxication, police said.

The incident took place in the heart of the city's French Quarter neighborhood, famous for its music, food and lively bar scene.

Landrieu has represented Louisiana in the U.S. Senate since 1997.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - He's been commander in chief, Time magazine's 1993 man of the year, had hopes of becoming "First Laddie" of the United States and now former U.S. President Bill Clinton is in line for a new title - Father of the Year.

The non-profit National Father's Day Council plans to award him that honor at a New York fundraiser for Save the Children on Tuesday.

Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, was just 12 years old when the family moved into the White House and Bill Clinton and wife former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton worked to keep her out of the limelight.

One of the most iconic images of the family to come out of that period was when the three were photographed, walking hand in hand across the White House lawn to a waiting helicopter shortly after the news broke of Bill Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. That scandal lead to Clinton's impeachment for perjury.

Chelsea Clinton, now 33 and a special correspondent for NBC News, said on Twitter "I completely agree!!!" when the award was first made public in January.

The National Father's Day Council cited Clinton's philanthropy work through the William J. Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, both started after he left the White House in 2001.

In addition to his charity work, Bill Clinton appeared on the campaign trail in 2008 when Hillary Clinton ran for president, joking that if she was elected his honorific title could be "First Laddie."

Clinton, 66, as well as Macy's Inc Chief Executive Terry Lundgren, will be honored for "their success in balancing accomplished careers and the demands of fatherhood," the council said in a statement.

Since the Father of the Year award was first bestowed in 1941, the citation has gone to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, Generals Douglas MacArthur, Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, and sports notables Shaquille O'Neal and George Foreman.

Years after leaving the White House, as he prepared for his daughter's 2010 wedding to investment banker Marc Mezvinsky, Bill Clinton said he was preparing for what he called the most important job he would ever do: "walking Chelsea down the aisle."

(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Andre Grenon)

Instead of a typical flashy presentation at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the Japanese gaming giant opted to showcase several games for its Wii U system during a brief Tuesday presentation at its booth on the show floor of the gaming industry's annual trade show.

"Today is different," Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime told those gathered inside the behemoth white structure. "It's the reason you're gathered here inside of our booth standing instead of sitting because it was our decision to minimize the time from when we said 'good morning' and you getting to play the game."

Nintendo showed off the cartoony strategy game "Pikmin 3," anti-gravity racer "Mario Kart 8," 2-D platformer "Donkey Kong Country Returns: Tropical Freeze," 3-D platformer "Super Mario 3D World," slick action sequel "Bayonetta 2" and a speedier rendition of "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker" for the Wii U. For gamers who couldn't make it to E3, the titles will be on display at more than 100 Best Buy Co. stores in North America this week.

The company also flaunted but didn't allow attendees to play a new installment in the fighting series "Super Smash Bros." The new edition will feature such characters as Mario, Mega Man and the female yoga trainer from Wii Fit.

The company has struggled since November with the launch of the Wii U, which features an innovative tablet-like controller yet graphics on par with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo Co. said it sold just 3.45 million units by the end of March, well below the company's expectations.

"We feel very good about this E3, and that's because consumers buy hardware to play games, and we're got a fantastic lineup of games that we're showcasing," Fils-Aime said after the event.

During showy Monday presentations, competitors Microsoft and Sony hyped their respective next-generation consoles. Microsoft Corp. touted new games for the Xbox One, which it said will cost $499, while Sony Corp. unveiled its boxy $399 console, the PlayStation 4. Both consoles feature richer graphics and deeper social networking capabilities.

"Our competition is going to do what best serves their needs," said Fils-Aime. "We're a different type of company, utilizing our first-party titles to drive our install base. We've done that very effectively for over 30 years. We're a video game company. We make great games. That's what we focus on."

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang .

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Art experts are hoping strong interest from Asian buyers and a buoyant market, sparked by a record-breaking sale of contemporary art earlier this month, will boost two Latin American auctions in New York this week.

A bronze sculpture of a dancing couple by Colombian Fernando Botero and paintings by Mexican Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Chilean Roberto Matta and Brazilian Candido Portinari are expected to be the highlights of the sales at Christie's and Sotheby's.

Earlier this month the auction houses had blockbuster sales of Impressionist and contemporary art. Christie's contemporary art sale on May 15 hauled in $495 million - the highest of any art auction ever.

"Obviously the contemporary art sale was on a historical scale," said Virgilio Garza, Christie's Latin American art chief. "So we hope we continue with the level of energy that the market has."

Christie's estimates $24 million to $34 million in total Latin American sales on Wednesday and Thursday. If the upper limit is reached, it will top the peak of the auction house's sale of the region's art, set at $33.7 million in May 2008, months before the Wall Street crash.

Sotheby's expects about $20.7 million to $28.7 million in Latin American art sales on Tuesday and Wednesday.

"We saw $1.5 billion in Impressionist and contemporary art sold in barely two weeks in New York (this month)," said Axel Stein, Latin American art chief at Sotheby's. "That doesn't mean necessarily that manna will a rain on us directly, but it almost assures we won't have just normal or negative sales."

Top-priced works at each auction house include paintings by the late Ramos Martinez, whose art was collected by Hollywood luminaries after he moved to Los Angeles to find expert medical care for his daughter. Christie's see his circa 1930 work "Mujeres con Frutas" (Women with Fruit) fetching $1 million to $1.5 million.

Sotheby's has a pre-sale estimate of up to $1 million for his "La India de Floripondios," (Indian Woman with Daturas). In the painting with its trumpet-shaped flowers, Ramos Martinez evokes French painter Paul Cezanne's use of circles, cylinders and cones to create a composition, according to Stein.

The artist reserves flowing lines in the work for the woman's smooth brown face, framed by braided black hair.

Overall, both auction houses expect Asian demand to be a driver of the sales, following the May 23-26 Art Basel Hong Kong art fair where the Swiss Galerie Gmurzynska said it sold $3.5 million worth of Boteros, including $1.3 million for the 2012 painting "Quarteto," which went to a collector form Malaysia.

Christie's is offering Botero's 2000 bronze "Dancers," which could fetch up to $1 million. It portrays a heavily muscled nude man and woman, her left hand on his right shoulder.

Sotheby's single highest-priced lot is Matta's circa 1939 oil on canvas "Morphologie Psycologique," (Psychological Morphology). Among its innovative techniques is drip painting, prefiguring a technique used by American Jackson Pollock, who was a student of Matta's in New York in the 1940s.

Portinari's 1941 oil on canvas "Meninos Soltando Pipas" (Children Releasing Kites)," is expected to be the top-priced Brazilian art work. Christie's estimates it will sell for up to $1.2 million.

The painting was done during a stage of Portinari's career, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, that showed children playing leap frog or chasing kites and balloons, according to Christie's.

(Reporting by Walker Simon; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Bill Trott)