Chelsea were on an emotional peak at the close of the win over Barcelona but Jose Mourinho is still in the foothills of his mission in England. The manager has said as much before when predicting that the best of his team will not be seen until his third year at Stamford Bridge. Tuesday brought one of the most memorable nights in the club’s history but it also showed just what Mourinho meant.
Any discussion of Birmingham City and their trophy-less fans starts on the basis of sympathy. This is only partly to do with Steve Bruce’s current failure to produce in the Blues any kind of high-powered Premiership resurrection. It has do to with their accent (think Nigell Mansell) and their city, a huge concrete jungle that is essentially Dullsville UK.
Olympic inspectors visiting Paris were among a lucky minority able to move freely around the French capital on Thursday as public sector workers brought the country grinding to a halt, severely disrupting buses, trains and flights, shutting schools and leaving papers undelivered and radio stations silent.
A pair of spectacles, a set of keys, a student card, a watch, a few euros, a single grey trainer. Rita Betancourt removes the objects delicately from a small green box and places them on the table of the immaculate suburban home where she and her husband, Luis Tenesaca, now live alone.
Although it’s a movie about boxing and contains any number of neatly staged fight scenes,it is about fathers and daughters, real or ersatz, and about emotional remoteness and proximity, and doing one last good-bad thing before you die.Black boxers took on the world and knocked it flying, but Hollywood is more concerned with white ones, writes John Patterson.
While it’s not a new idea to get pop stars to do Cole Porter’s songs for this movie, <i>De-Lovely</i> has managed to keep the approach traditional, without trying to spruce up Porter’s work for the MTV generation, writes Riaan Wolmarans.
"The way in for me was to ask questions like, when is the birth of conscience? Not just for a character in a novel, but also for the writer writing the novel." Andie Miller spoke to exiled Nigerian novelist Chris Abani.
A suicide bomb tore through a packed funeral ceremony at a Shia mosque in Mosul on Thursday, killing at least 46 people and wounding up to 100 others. The attack appeared to be the latest outrage by Sunni militants intent on fomenting sectarian strife and destabilising attempts to form an elected Iraqi government.
Microsoft on Thursday announced a deal to buy a company run by the creator of IBM’s Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie, at the same time hiring him to be one of the software firm’s most senior technical executives. Ozzie will join Microsoft in the role of chief technical officer and will report directly to chairperson and chief software architect Bill Gates.
The neon sign outside describes the club as a ”show venue”, but the only people taking to the stage are crooning customers and their scantily-clad escorts. A report last year by the United States State Department placed Japan on a par with Mexico and Laos for its failure to stem the trade in sex workers.