Sri Lanka left themselves 47 runs ahead of England at stumps on the second day of the third and final Test at Trent Bridge in Nottingham on Saturday. Upul Tharanga was 17 not out and Kumar Sangakkara 22 not as Sri Lanka looked to give Muttiah Muralitharan enough runs to bowl at to help them square the series at 1-1.
Janice Josephs, South African national record holder in the heptathlon, occupied fourth place after the first day of the annual international combined events meeting in Arles, France, with a total of 3 612 points. She trails leader Jessica Zelinka of Canada by 153 points after the first four events.
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England, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Portugal earned big wins in World Cup warm-ups on Saturday, six days before the start of the tournament. Peter Crouch led England with three goals and Michael Owen added another in the team’s 6-0 win over Jamaica.
Defending champion Rafael Nadal marked his 20th birthday with a gruelling 5-7, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4 win against Paul-Henri Mathieu on Saturday to set up a mouth-watering clash against Lleyton Hewitt for a place in the French Open quarterfinals. Hewitt, playing Roland Garros for the first time in two years, swept past Slovakian 22nd seed Dominik Hrbaty.
A suicide car bomber blew himself up in a crowded market in oil-rich southern Basra on Saturday, killing 28 people and wounding 62. In Baghdad, a Russian diplomat was killed and four diplomatic employees were kidnapped. Meanwhile, Iraq’s prime minister is poised to appoint ministers to run the army and police.
About 200 white Afrikaners met ceremonially at the historic Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein on Saturday in a bid to ensure that the monument remains an Afrikaner symbol. The event, organised by the Afrikaner Kultuurbond, started with the hoisting of the old Orange Free State and Transvaal Boer Republic’s flags.
An emergency law aimed at preventing Irish child-sex offenders from getting out of prison has ended up criminalising sex between consenting teenagers. The Irish government admitted on Saturday that its Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill 2006 would outlaw sex between 16-year-olds.
The Swiss clinic where dozens of people have been helped to die, including British patients, has a new problem: the neighbours are complaining that they are fed up with bodies being taken out of the apartment block, where the clinic is located, in the communal lift.
The waters are rising around Venice. Each year the floods worsen and last longer. Carpets of slime coat St Mark’s Square. Statues and church walls are coated with filth. The city is drowning. But there is a solution: run the place like Disneyland, says leading United Kingdom economist John Kay.
When Suratini saw friends from her village carrying nine corpses of earthquake victims wrapped in sarongs and blankets down the street in front of her, she could not hold back her tears. It was at this moment last Saturday afternoon — eight hours after the village of Suren Kulon was flattened by the quake — that she was photographed.