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.
United States President George Bush called on Saturday night for the American Constitution to be amended to ban gay marriage, a move seen as a bid to shore up his collapsing support among conservative voters. In his weekly radio address, Bush attacked what he called ”activist courts” for legalising gay marriage in several states.
Raymond Triboulet, a World War II Resistance fighter who helped to stage the D-Day landings in Normandy before serving as minister under Charles de Gaulle, died on Friday at the age of 99. Enrolled in the French army and taken prisoner at the start of the war, Triboulet returned home under the German occupation in 1941.
Iran seemed finally to be backing away from a confrontation with the United States and Europe over its nuclear programme, as senior officials and politicians in Tehran said on Saturday that proposals put forward last week might form the basis for negotiation.