Liverpool held hosts Chelsea to a goalless draw in the all-English Champions League semifinal first leg at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday. The Reds will be delighted to go into the second leg on May 3 unscathed but Chelsea will be undaunted by the task of winning 1-0 at Anfield for a second time this season.
England skipper David Beckham said he is ”amazed” and finds it ”incredible” that his family’s former nanny sold a story making claims about his marriage to a Sunday tabloid newspaper. The Real Madrid player and his wife, Victoria, have already admitted they plan to sue the former nanny Abbie Gibson for breach of confidence
A South African gaming company is prepared to spend over -billion as it takes on the world’s top industry players in a high-stakes battle to build and run casino resorts in Singapore. Peermont Global is among 14 companies invited by the government to submit detailed plans for two resorts that will include Singapore’s first casinos.
Zimbabwe was re-elected on Wednesday to the United Nations human rights commission, a controversial body that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wants to abolish this year. Four vacancies on the 53-nation commission were allotted for Africa, and there was African consensus to award one of the slots to Zimbabwe — whose leader Robert Mugabe is under US and European sanctions.
Togo slid deeper into civil conflict on Wednesday when at least six people were killed and dozens injured in clashes sparked by rival claims of victory in the weekend presidential elections. Opposition supporters wielded machetes against security forces in the capital, Lomé, as their leader, Emmanuel Akitani-Bob, denounced the poll as fraudulent and declared himself president.
For eight years Ronald Reagan kept a meticulous record of his presidency, filling five fat, leather-bound volumes with almost daily entries written in blue ink. That insider’s account of life at the helm of the world’s superpower will be publicly available with the publication of Reagan’s White House diaries.
Scientists warn on Thursday that the Atlantic bluefin tuna faces extinction unless urgent action is taken. ”In my lifetime we’ve bought this majestic species to the doorstep of ecological extinction in the Western Atlantic Ocean,” said Barbara Block of Stanford University in California.
The southern African kingdom of Lesotho is set to hold its first-ever local elections on Saturday but uncertainty over the role and powers of the new office bearers has taken the sheen off the polls. Grassroots elections were first mooted in 1993 when the Basutoland Congress Party came to power after a series of military dictatorships.
A Polish monk close to the late Pope John Paul II was ordered back to Poland from the Vatican on Wednesday to face allegations he spied on the pontiff for his country’s communist regime in the closing stages of the Cold War. An official in Warsaw said Father Konrad Hejmo had collaborated with the secret police in the 1980s when the communist government was struggling to cling to power.
A 24-year-old Mozambican woman died of a cocaine overdose after a bag containing the drug burst in her stomach on a flight from Brazil, police said on Thursday. Superintendent Eugene Opperman said Teresa Martins lost consciousness on a flight from Sao Paulo in Brazil on Saturday morning.