Bangladesh crumbled to 58 runs for five wickets on Saturday after India’s four top batsmen smashed confident centuries to build a massive first-innings total in the second and final Test. Opener Dinesh Karthik hit 129, captain Rahul Dravid made 129 and Sachin Tendulkar was unbeaten on 122 when India declared their innings at 610-3.
Tony Blair will head to Africa this week for his last visit as British Prime Minister after a decade in power, during which he made helping the continent a key priority. But while widely praised for tackling poverty and debt, experts say he leaves behind a mixed legacy. Blair is expected in Sierra Leone and South Africa.
A United Nations peacekeeper was killed in Darfur, the first UN casualty since the world body began sending small reinforcements to a beleaguered African Union force deployed in the violent western Sudan region, the AU and UN said on Saturday. He was shot by unidentified gunmen who looted his house late on Friday.
Dutch broadcaster BNN plans to air a television show next week where a terminally ill woman will decide who out of three young patients will get her kidney, Dutch media said on Saturday. Viewers will be able to advise the 37-year-old woman, known as Lisa, via SMS which of the candidates to pick, a newspaper said.
Government plans to convert thousands of hectares of rainforest on an island on Uganda’s Lake Victoria into a palm-oil plantation have been shelved, officials said on on Saturday. The environment minister said the Kenyan company that applied for the licence backed off, fearing negative publicity about the project.
Russian nationalists, communists and religious believers gathered in Moscow on Saturday to denounce plans for a Gay Pride march, as gay activists prepared to lobby the mayor to lift a ban on the event. About 200 protesters, including flag-waving communists or old women carrying religious icons, held a ”Russia March”.
A fierce battle is under way this weekend to rescue a proposed global climate agreement in time for the Group of Eight (G8) summit in a fortnight’s time in Germany, after sources close to the talks said Washington appeared to be edging away from outright rejection of moves to halt rising world temperatures.
Ukraine’s feuding president and prime minister on Sunday agreed to hold an early parliamentary election on September 30, diffusing the country’s months-long political crisis that had threatened to escalate into violence. ”We found a decision, which is a compromise,” Yushchenko was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Senior officials in the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Hamas were on Saturday trying to broker an end to the bloody siege of a Lebanese refugee camp, which began last week when the Lebanese army engaged members of Fatah al-Islam, an al-Qaeda-inspired group, after a bank robbery in the city of Tripoli.
An Australian doctor on a trans-Pacific flight was upgraded to first class and given a bottle of vintage champagne after delivering a baby for a Brazilian who didn’t even know she was pregnant, news reports said on Sunday. The mid-air birth was even more remarkable because it brought together an eminent obstetrician with a complex breech birth.