Daily News Channel
Women’s top seed Dinara Safina reached her second successive French Open final with a straight-sets semifinal victory over Slovakia’s Dominika Cibulkova on Thursday. The world number one posted a 6-3 6-3 success in an hour and 41 minutes and is now just one more victory away from a first-ever grand slam title.
Fourth seed Elena Dementieva followed third-ranked Venus Williams in departing the French Open at the third-round stage after being upset by Samantha Stosur on Saturday. The 30th-seeded Australian won 6-3 4-6 6-1 to equal her best performance at a Grand Slam tournament
Rafael Nadal made light work of former world number one Lleyton Hewitt to reach the fourth round of the French Open on Friday.
Not many people know that Charles Dickens was an actor as well as a writer. A workaholic who was haunted by memories of his impoverished childhood, when he worked in a blacking factory, Dickens was never the most emotionally stable of men at the best of times, never mind at the worst. In 1857 his friend Wilkie Collins wrote a play about a failed Arctic expedition.
Royal Challengers Bangalore booked their place in the Indian Premier League final with a six-wicket victory over the Chennai Super Kings thanks largely to a 72-run partnership between Rahul Dravid and Manish Pandey. Bangalore, one of the worst teams in the inaugural IPL, will now face another side that battled in the 2008 season, Deccan Chargers, in Sunday’s climax at the Wanderers.
Australia’s iconic Tasmanian devil — widely known as trouble in Looney Tunes cartoons — has been put on the country’s endangered list, environmental officials announced Friday.
Injury-plagued Maria Sharapova is returning to WTA Tour action at next week’s Warsaw Open in Poland, the former world number one announced on her personal Web site. The clay court event, which starts on May 18, will be her first appearance in singles since the Rogers Cup in Montreal last August.
Wide green expanses of farmland outside a picturesque northern French village hide memories of a World War I battle in which thousands of British and Australian troops were killed or wounded on a single night.
World champion Lewis Hamilton and his McLaren team have escaped with a suspended three-race ban for "deliverately misleading" stewards at the Australian Grand Prix.
Ten villages in western Niger have publicly denounced the practice of female genital mutilation, according to a UNICEF report. The FIA Court of Appeal said that the rear diffusers used by the Brawn, Williams and Toyota teams “comply with the applicable regulations.” The FIA panel sat for eight hours in Paris on Tuesday to hear evidence and their decision backs up a decision by the stewards at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix that the controversial aerodynamic devices were within the rules