Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal both took confident first steps towards an eventual third straight grand-slam final showdown in the first round of the United States Open on Wednesday. Top seed Federer of Switzerland needed just one hour and 40 minutes to dispatch Wang Yeu-Tzuoo of Taiwan 6-4, 6-1, 6-0.
Rain wrecked the second day of the US Open on Tuesday with only an hour of play possible all day. A three-and-a-half hour delay kept players off court to start with as heavy showers swept through the New York area and when they did begin hitting balls, it was women’s top seed Amelie Mauresmo who got the action under way.
Andre Agassi’s retirement will have to wait a little longer after the eight-times grand slam winner battled to a 6-7 7-6 7-6 6-2 victory over Romania’s Andrei Pavel in the US Open first round on Monday. At times looking like a maestro and others like the 36-year-old he is, Agassi needed three hours and 31 minutes to clinch victory.
Internet giant Google and online auctioneer eBay said on Monday they had struck an alliance to boost their text-based and ”click-to-call” advertising revenues. Under the deal, Google advertisers will be promoted on eBay’s auction websites around the world as the two companies seek to increase online commerce through the use of emerging internet telephony services.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has urged Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) presidential election rivals Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba to meet and work together to end fighting between their supporters, the UN said on Tuesday.
A key United Nations Security Council member said on Monday he was puzzled by an Arab League request for an indefinite delay in a planned council meeting on the crisis in Darfur. Ghanaian UN ambassador Nana Effah-Apenteng, the Security Council president for August, said he got a positive response when he asked the Arab League about the meeting last week.
Trapped and running out of air on the smoky 83rd floor of the World Trade Centre, Melissa Doi begged the emergency operator not to hang up. ”Can you stay on the line with me, please? I feel like I’m dying,” she said. On Wednesday, her voice was heard as New York City released new tapes of hundreds of heart-wrenching phone calls from that day.
United States beverages giant PepsiCo on Monday named company high-flier Indra Nooyi as its new boss, capping a rapid rise to the highest ranks of corporate America for the Indian-born woman. Nooyi will join an exclusive list of women CEOs heading top US companies.
Singer Boy George tried to perform court-ordered community service on Monday but found a major obstacle when a throng of news photographers prevented him from sweeping the streets of Lower Manhattan. ”It’s supposed to me making me humble. Why don’t you just let me do it,” George told photographers.
The shutdown of a major Alaskan oil field sent oil prices sharply higher on Monday and prompted investors to sell stocks on inflation fears, one day before the Federal Reserve’s next decision on interest rates. BP plc said late on Sunday it would shut down the Prudhoe Bay oilfield due to possible pipeline corrosion.
In nursing homes and college dorms, in crowded cities and spread-out suburbs, Americans confront an ailment with no single cause or cure. Some call it social isolation or disconnectedness. Often, it’s just plain loneliness. According to a new study documenting Americans’ shrinking circle of intimate friends, it is worsening.
World oil prices fell on Friday, but losses were limited by strong demand, tight supplies and geopolitical tensions, analysts said. Traders were monitoring the latest developments in Nigeria, the biggest oil producer in Africa, where three Filipino oil and gas workers were abducted on Friday.
The United Nations appeared on the verge of breaking the deadlock over Lebanon recently, paving the way for a Security Council resolution in which major powers including the United States and Britain would demand an immediate end to fighting.
As violence escalated in Lebanon, diplomats insisted that disagreements on the council were now all but resolved, and that a resolution could be voted on by early next week.
New York City commuters sweated on their way to work on Wednesday as the temperature and humidity started climbing back up to heatwave levels after a night of little relief. New York’s LaGuardia airport still had 34 degrees Celsius at midnight and eased only to 30 degrees Celsius by 6am, the National Weather Service said.
A social networking website for Americans aged 50-plus went live on Monday — complete with an online obituary database that sends out alerts when someone you may know dies. The founder of internet job site Monster.com, Jeff Taylor, launched Eons.com, a similar site to the popular online teen hang-out MySpace for the 50-plus crowd.
Some of the testosterone found in Tour de France winner Floyd Landis’s ”A” sample is from an external source and not his body’s, The New York Times said on Tuesday quoting an unidentified International Cycling Union official. The carbon-isotope test on the first of Landis’s two urine samples contains synthetic testosterone, said the official.
ABC Television Network pulled a miniseries about the Holocaust it was developing with Mel Gibson’s production company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, quoting an unidentified representative for the network. Gibson was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving early on Friday and was reported to have launched into a tirade against Jews.
The state of Africa, says Charlayne Hunter-Gault in her most recent book, <i>New News Out of Africa</i>, is in many ways shaped by the public’s image of the continent — and the image of Africa is in the hands of the media. Besieged by clichéd headlines bearing news of the "four Ds" — death, destruction, disease and despair — Africa needs fresh, "new news" reporting.
American Justin Gatlin, the world and Olympic 100m champion and co-holder of the 100m world record, revealed on Saturday that he had tested positive for ”testosterone or its precursors” in April. ”I have been informed by the United States Anti-Doping Agency that … I tested positive for ‘testosterone or its precursors’,” Gatlin said in a statement.
Time Warner, the global media leader, on Wednesday will take the wraps off plans for ailing internet unit AOL, which may include shedding subscriber-access fees seen as blocking advertising revenue. Since 2005 Time Warner has openly pursued a strategy of developing free-access programs on AOL — such as TV series, news and music — to compete with Yahoo! and Google.
A prison inmate pleaded guilty on Tuesday to sending letters to the FBI and Secret Service that included bomb and anthrax threats — as well as his full name and inmate number. Donald Ray Bilby (30) pleaded guilty in United States District Court in Trenton to one count of false information and hoaxes after he sent five letters demanding authorities deposit 000 in his county jail inmate account.
The remains of actor James Doohan, who played the starship Enterprise‘s chief engineer ”Scotty” on Star Trek, will be blasted into space in October, the company organising the flight said on Monday. On the programme, when Captain James Kirk ventured off the spaceship Enterprise and faced peril, he would demand Scotty ”beam” him back up to the safety of the ship.
A mysterious electrical problem in New York City blamed for subway delays, flight cancellations and power failures on the hottest days of the year persisted for a fifth day on Friday, leaving 2 500 customers without power. The blackouts started on Monday evening in a handful of neighbourhoods in Queens.
Thousands of delegates from around the world gather in Toronto, Canada, next month for the Sixteenth International Aids Conference. "We have the knowledge to defeat HIV now, we know what is effective, and that is recognising that the epidemic is caused by human rights abuses, which fuel the epidemic," said Joseph Amon, director of the HIV/Aids programme at Human Rights Watch.
Knowledge of available treatment options and the significance of drug resistance has declined in patients infected with HIV, the virus that causes Aids, according to results of a survey presented on Tuesday. ”In the early days of HIV, patients often understood the science of HIV as much as most clinicians,” said Dr Howard Grossman.
What are you complaining about? If you’re a New Yorker, it’s often about noise and trash and occasionally about politics or morals. Those are some of the concerns expressed over the past 300 years by citizens writing to their mayor, as unearthed by an artist who mined the city’s archives to create the New York City Museum of Complaint.
The New York Times plans to shrink the size of its pages in 2008, making them about 4cm narrower, the newspaper reported in Tuesday’s edition. The newspaper also plans to cut 1Â 050 jobs, including 800 positions at a New Jersey printing plant whose workload will shift to another in New York City.
The New York Times on Friday received a letter containing a suspicious white powder and a copy of a recent editorial in which the paper defended its coverage of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism programmes. The powder incident raised fears of a repeat of a series of anthrax attacks in the United States, which started one week after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
The headbutt: it’s the new butt of internet jokes. As swiftly as a speeding shot on goal, riffs on Zinedine Zidane’s infamous moment of soccer rage have invaded cyberspace. Though fans across the world are clearly divided on whether the French star deserves condemnation or sympathy for headbutting Italy’s Marco Materazzi, the web has been typically merciless.
New York authorities are investigating whether a doctor who survived the explosion of a four-storey home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Monday might have caused the blast rather than sell the home as part of a divorce judgement in his ex-wife’s favour.
Daniel Libeskind has had his fingers badly burned by the acrimonious project to rebuild the World Trade Center site, but the Ground Zero architect remains convinced his vision will be realised. Since his master plan was chosen from an international field in February 2003, Libeskind has been forced to watch as major elements of his blueprint have been radically modified or taken out of his hands altogether.
The FBI uncovered a plot to bomb New York’s Holland Tunnel, subways and other tunnels by Muslim extremists, one of whom has been arrested in Beirut, The Daily News reported on Friday. The daily said the terrorists hoped to flood lower Manhattan’s financial district.