Argentina clinched a home semifinal tie against Australia after narrowly beating reigning champions Croatia in the Davis Cup quarterfinals in Zagreb on Sunday. The tie went right to the wire but Juan Ignecio Chela kept his nerve over two tie-breaks to beat Sasa Tuksar 3-6, 6-4, 7-6 (8/6), 7-6 (7/5) in the deciding rubber.
Oil-company and Nigerian officials said on Friday they were optimistic that the country’s oil production would recover as soon as next week, following rebel attacks earlier this year that knocked out more than a quarter of the country’s oil flows.
The environment group Greenpeace on Thursday launched a campaign against McDonald’s, accusing the United States restaurant chain of abetting the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest by buying meat raised from Amazonian soya. Greenpeace protestors staged colourful but peaceful demonstrations at several McDonald’s restaurants in Britain and Germany.
Arsenal progressed serenely into the Champions League semifinals for the first time in their history on Wednesday with a thoroughly professional performance against Italian giants Juventus. The Gunners drew 0-0 — winning 2-0 on aggregate — against a less-than-inspired Juventus outfit, whose appalling disciplinary record in the quarterfinal saw a third player sent off in Pavel Nedved.
Irish playwright Samuel Beckett was a man who weighed his words, a solitary, lonely figure obsessed by silence, whose works struggled to express the absurdity of life. One hundred years after his birth, his tragicomic plays stalked by a host of unforgettable, often grotesque, characters remain among the most important of 20th century theatre.
This year is likely to be another bad one for hurricanes, according to an early forecast issued on Wednesday by a scientific team that last year accurately predicted the 2005 storm season would be major. Tropical Storm Risk (TSR) said there was an 80% probability that 2006 would be in the top one-third of the most active seasons for Atlantic tropical storms in the record books.
The French Open will offer equal prize money to the men’s and women’s champions for the first time. Each champion will receive â,¬940 000 (,13-million), the French Tennis Federation said on Monday. ”We’re following the evolution of tennis in general a little bit,” said Stephane Simean, the federation official in charge of setting the prizes.
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has admitted in an interview that he made errors and was misunderstood in his management of a hotly contested youth labour law that has sent students and unions into the streets in violent protests. He denied, however, that he has been disavowed by President Jacques Chirac.
A stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower on the banks of the Seine, the final touches are being put to Europe’s newest museum, a huge project celebrating and bringing to life non-Western art and heritage. Named the Musee du Quai Branly after its location, the museum will house about 300Â 000 works of tribal art.
It has been called the Sun-eating Dragon. The Spirit of the Dead. The Eye of God. A harbinger of great events, good and evil — terrible famines, bumper harvests, wars, the birth and death of kings. On Wednesday, tens of millions of people will be treated to this spine-tingling celestial sight: a total eclipse of the Sun.
Cars were torched and shops burnt in central Paris on Thursday night after the seventh big protest in eight days against the government’s controversial employment law ended in clashes between hooded youths and riot police. The youths grouped on the pavements on the Esplanade des Invalides and armed themselves with baseball bats and metal bars.
When student demonstrators in France wore trash bags to protests, their message was: ”We’re not disposable.” Officially, they are angry about a new government job plan that makes it easier for employers to hire and fire them. But that was just the tipping point.
One of Paris’s most famous chefs, Rene Lasserre, who founded the legendary restaurant that bears his name, has died at the age of 93, the current owner said on Thursday. Lasserre, who stepped down from the helm five years ago, died late on Wednesday, said Gerard Louis-Canfailla.
Paris police have arrested 187 people in connection with violent clashes that followed Thursday’s demonstrations against new labour laws, the city’s police chief Pierre Mutz said on Friday. Mutz described those behind the violence, in which 46 police officers were injured, as ”louts” and said he hoped to identify them by the end of the day.
Riot police on Thursday night fired rubber pellets and tear gas at students who pelted them with petrol bombs and stones as protests at new labour laws boiled over in the heart of Paris. Police fought running battles with the rioters, who set cars alight and smashed shop windows near the Sorbonne on the Left Bank.
French cosmetics giant L’Oreal said on Friday it would buy Body Shop International, renowned for its ethical hair and skin products, for $1,143-billion (£652 million). L’Oreal will pay 300 pence a share for Body Shop, which will be maintained as a separate entity and continue to be led by its current management team.
"There are only two kinds of people in the world: the Irish and those who wish they were." So goes one Irish adage. And on Friday millions will get a wish come true, with parades and parties marking St Patrick’s Day which, just like Irish immigrant communities, have spread to become a global excuse for a bit of <i>craic</i>, or fun.
Fifa has agreed not to restrict the media from online publication of World Cup photographs during the soccer tournament in Germany later this year. The governing body of world soccer and the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) said on Monday they have reached an accord to allow media photos to be used.
France outclassed world champions England in Paris on Sunday to win their Six Nations clash 31-6 on the 100th anniversary of their first meeting in the tournament and inflict the worst defeat on the visitors between the sides in 34 years.
The death of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in a United Nations cell on Saturday prompted widespread dismay that the ”Butcher of the Balkans” had escaped justice. But his allies accused the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague of being fully responsible for his death.
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.
MPs from France’s ruling conservative party have blocked a move to legalise internet downloading of movie and music files, after several days of sharp debate in Parliament. MPs from the Socialist, Communist, Green and UDF parties walked out in protest ahead of the vote, allowing it to be adopted nearly unanimously.
Horrors such as the Rwandan genocide, in which 800Â 000 people were killed in 100 days, are an appalling indictment of man’s inhumanity and must be told, said British actor John Hurt. He was talking ahead of the release of his latest film, Shooting Dogs, which opens in France on Wednesday.
A publicity stunt in which a golf ball will be whacked into orbit from the International Space Station has met a chilly reception from scientists, who say the scheme is risky and adds to the growing problem of space junk. Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov is to take on the role of a celestial Tiger Woods under a deal between a Canadian golf club manufacturer and the cash-strapped Russian Space Agency.
The Pentagon is funding research into neural implants, with the ultimate hope of turning sharks into "stealth spies" capable of gliding undetected through the ocean, the British weekly <i>New Scientist</i> says. "The Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks’ natural ability to glide quietly through the water," says the report.
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/ 28 February 2006
The recent violence surrounding the publication in the West of caricatures of the prophet Muhammad illustrate the danger of Islamic ”totalitarianism”, Salman Rushdie and a group of other writers said in a statement obtained on Tuesday. ”After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism,” they wrote.
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/ 28 February 2006
United Nations chief Kofi Annan hailed France’s idea to tax airline tickets to fund development aid on Tuesday, in an address at the opening of an international conference in Paris. He urged other countries to follow suit, noting that Chile was also implementing the tax.
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/ 27 February 2006
International veterinary experts gathered in Paris on Monday to discuss the fight against bird flu as the lethal H5N1 strain made further advances in Africa and French authorities started a mass vaccination programme of ducks and geese. The potentially deadly virus made new strides in Africa, with reports of the first cases in Niger.
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/ 22 February 2006
French investigators headed to Côte d’Ivoire on Tuesday to hunt the leader of a gang that tortured and murdered a young Jewish man near Paris, a crime thought to have been motivated in part by anti-Semitism. Two officers were expected in Abidjan late in the day to track down the gang’s alleged leader, a 25-year-old convicted petty criminal of Ivorian origin.
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/ 17 February 2006
History contends that the ashes of Saint Joan of Arc were gathered up from the pyre on which she was burned alive and tossed into the River Seine. Anxious to avoid creating a martyr, the English, who had ordered her death in 1431, wanted nothing left of the 19-year-old French heroine. According to legend, a devoted follower managed to find and conceal some of her remains.
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/ 16 February 2006
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy branded Iran’s nuclear programme for the first time on Thursday as a ”clandestine, military” project. In response to sharp protests from Iran, however, France’s foreign ministry reiterated Paris’s official position, which is that Tehran’s nuclear activities ”raise doubts about their peaceful nature”.
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/ 13 February 2006
Inspired by the absent Lleyton Hewitt, Australia booked their Davis Cup quarterfinal berth on Sunday with a 3-2 victory over Switzerland that came down to the final rubber. Heavy-hitting debutant Chris Guccione heroically wrapped up the weekend on the back of 39 aces, crushing George Bastl 7-5, 6-3, 7-6 (9/7) to send the visitors into an April quarterfinal against Belarus.