For a brief moment President George Bush thought he might have lost. As Air Force One was touching down in Washington on election-day afternoon, his political adviser, Karl Rove, was hunched over an onboard phone getting the first exit poll data from the battleground states.

In the bars and cafes of Dupont Circle, the centre of Washington DC’s gay scene, the mood is funereal. The American gay community, already reeling from a ”broad and widespread assault” under a Bush presidency, now feels under siege from the country itself.

Spain’s bullfighters have had enough. The men in the sequinned suits say they are under attack from a new enemy far more frightening than the half-tonne bulls they kill or the animal rights activists who want their bloody sport banned. The enemy who have the matadors trembling in their silk socks and tight trousers have emerged, instead, from the bullfighters’ own beds — groupies cashing in on their sexual encounters with a rash of kiss-and-tell stories.

Trumpeted as a new species of human being, the ”hobbit” folk of Indonesia are really just sick members of Homo sapiens, it has been alleged. The claim- – by Teuku Jacob, professor of paleoanthropology at Indonesia’s Gadjah Mada university — threatens to trigger an academic row over the discovery of an extinct race of little hominid people, Homo floresiensis, on the island of Flores.

Iraqi insurgents took the war to the United States-led coalition on Saturday, launching a devastating series of attacks across the centre of the country, even as US forces massed for an assault on the rebel-held city of Fallujah. At least 20 US marines were injured by a car bomb in the city of Ramadi after fierce clashes overnight.

South African rugby coach Jake White said there was no euphoria in the Tri-Nations champions’ dressing room after their Grand Slam bid got off to a winning start with a 38-36 victory at the Millennium Stadium on Saturday. ”Obviously we are relieved we won,” White told a post-match news conference.

A French defence ministry spokesperson on Sunday denied claims that French troops had killed around 30 Ivorians and wounded 100 others in clashes over the last 24 hours. Ivorian parliament speaker Mamadou Coulibaly had earlier announced the death toll on French public radio. Thousands of demonstrators had trooped towards Abidjan’s international airport, prompting warning shots from French helicopters.