Ralf Schumacher admitted in Manama on Friday that the lack of a third driver in Friday practice sessions could cost Toyota this season. Toyota finished fourth in last year’s constructors’ world championship, which disqualifies them from running a third car in Friday testing.
It had all the ingredients of a heartbreak defeat for Mvela log leaders Wits University as they succumbed to an opportunist 84th-minute headed goal from Collen Zimba to lose their first-round Absa Cup game 1-0 at Milpark on Friday night. Instead there were no tears in the promotion-seeking club’s ranks afterwards.
South Africa made major strides just by competing in the inaugural World Baseball Classic, despite getting outscored 38-12 in three games. Baseball officials in his country called upon 33-year-old Willem Kemp, the team’s oldest member, to lead this inexperienced squad half made up of teenagers.
French riot police stormed the marble-halled Sorbonne University early on Saturday, pushing out about 200 students occupying the historic institution, some for three days, to protest a government jobs plan. At least 80 helmeted police officers rushed the landmark institution to dislodge students.
The Bush administration has often been accused of a purely symbolic commitment to clean energy. But even its supporters might not reject that description of its latest announcement: the torch on the Statue of Liberty, perhaps the single most famous symbol of the United States, is to be lit exclusively by wind power.
When Irina Khakamada, the femme fatale of Russia’s political opposition, decided to run against Vladimir Putin in the presidential election in 2004, she asked a Russian public-relations firm how she should ”project her brand”. A brainstorming session yielded only one sure-fire strategy: stage the kidnapping of your husband and child.
It is one of Pakistan’s great parties — a joyous spring festival in the southern city of Lahore where party-goers crowd on to rooftops under a sky filled with fluttering kites. But this year the age-old celebration of Basant has been cancelled amid worries about killer kites, knife-sharp strings and ominous threats to prosecute teenage ”terrorists”.
Nine people have been found dead in two suspected group suicides in Japan this week, despite efforts to stem an alarming rise in death pacts by people meeting over the internet. Police discovered the bodies of five men and a woman — all in their 20s — in a van in a forest in Chichibu, 80km north-west of Tokyo, on Friday.
The Vatican has disconcerted Italian politicians by endorsing a proposal by radical Muslims for a weekly ”Islamic hour” in schools with a strong Muslim presence. The Speaker of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera, said the suggestion was ”the diametric opposite of any kind of attempt at integration”.
The trains have stopped running, the big wheel no longer spins and the elephant is packing its trunk. Californian authorities have effectively shut down Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch, saying the singer has not paid wages or insurance since the end of last year.