Two a penny

.Emerging teen star Melanie Oudin has sealed the United States’ passage to the semi-finals of the Fed Cup with a 7-6 (7-3), 6-4 win over Julie Coin, as the Americans eased through 4-1.
Also advancing were holders Italy, who waltzed past host Ukraine 4-1 in Kharkiv as the sister act of Alona and Kateryna Bondarenko failed to disturb Francessa Schiavone and Flavia Pennetta before Sara Errani and Roberta Vinci carried off the doubles for good measure.
“This victory is very important for me as I lost the decisive match against Italy in the final.
In the absence of the Williams sisters the American contingent has shown its strength in depth and Oudin, who looked a little out of her depth in last year’s final loss to Italy, was delighted to prove her own worth in bagging the all-important point at Lievin.
“Then I got into my game. I was tense to begin with but Julie was also making things tough for me as she was serving very well,” Oudin said.
Oudin, breaking crucially in the fifth game of the second set to steady herself, made headlines last year with an exciting run to the US Open quarters, having reached round four at Wimbledon, shocking former world number one Jelena Jankovic en route. I’m really happy to have helped my team win this match in France,” said the 18-year-old from Georgia, ranked 53 on the WTA computer as she took her country’s Fed Cup record to 11-1 against the French.
Here, she beat Pauline Parmentier in straight sets in the second singles rubber after 140th-ranked Bethanie Mattek-Sands had started the ball rolling with a 7-6 (9-7), 7-5 win over Alize Cornet.
At Flushing Meadows, she then defeated fourth seed Elena Dementieva and another former number one, Maria Sharapova.
But she was unable to prevent Oudin, taking her tournament record to 3-3, from sealing the decisive point which takes the USA through to the semi-finals as it hones in on an 18th title.
That loss being Cornet’s sixth loss in as many Fed Cup starts, team captain Nicolas Escude withdrew her from the firing line and sent in Coin.
Serbia kept in the clash thanks to the impeccable Jelena Jankovic, who made it two singles rubbers out of two when she beat former US Open champion Svetlana Kuznetsova 6-3, 4-6, 6-3.
In the semis, the Americans will play Russia, which edged Serbia 3-2 in a thrilling tie.
Elsewhere, the Czech Republic edged out Germany 3-2 at Brno in a thriller which went down to the final rubber.
However her team-mate Ana Ivanovic’s woeful form continued as she lost to Alisa Kleybanova in straight sets and then she and Jankovic had no answer in the decisive doubles as they were steam-rolled in straight sets.
But the 24-year-old was unable to complete a hat-trick in the doubles as, after seeing off Petra Kvitova early in the day, she and Tatjana Malek went down in straight sets to Lucie Hradecka and Kveta Peschke.
The Czechs, beaten semi-finalists by the USA last year and chasing a sixth title to go third in the historical rankings ahead of Spain, saw Anna-Lena Groenefeld bag two points for the Germans.

.The amateur archaeologist who first discovered a World War I mass grave in the French town of Fromelles says it was “wonderful” to see the first soldier from the site laid formally to rest at the weekend.
Gunshots rang out across the frozen cemetery on Saturday as the first of the 250 unknown British and Australian soldiers, who all died in the 1916 Battle of Fromelles, was lowered into an individual grave.
“It was wonderful to see the services and that’s what it’s all been about – dignity, and in time, identity for the soldiers of Pheasant Wood,” he said.
Lambis Englezos, whose work was central to bringing the Pheasant Wood grave to light, said he was moved watching the burial at the weekend. And hopefully in time we can give as many of these soldiers as possible their identity.
“Seeing the Army burying their own – our own – was really quite moving.”
The full military honours burial took place in a specially-built cemetary just metres from where the grave was discovered.
“For me, it’s wonderful to see the burial of that soldier and to know that our boys are in good hands in the village of Fromelles.
The final soldier will be buried and the cemetery will be dedicated on July 19, the 94th anniversary of the battle.
The fallen soldiers, who remained undisturbed for over 90 years, are being buried without headstones as a panel aims to identify as many as possible.
“I think we’ve got a moral obligation to recover our war dead, I think the Australian Army has to be congratulated, having established and maintained a process which has brought us to this point,” he said.
– ‘Moral obligation’ –
Mr Englezos said while it would have been preferable for families to be present to witness the individual burials of their loved ones, the sheer scale of the operation meant this was impossible.
“But having said that, Pheasant Wood and the work there, it’s not blood specific, there’s a general ownership of the Pheasant Wood work, and it’s just been remarkable to see this.
“However I would have hoped that maybe the panel of identification could have sat prior to the burial, so that families could have been given the opportunity to be there.
In 24 hours Australian forces suffered over 5,000 casualties as troops charged German trenches in broad daylight.”
The 1916 Battle of Fromelles was the first offensive involving Australian troops on the Western Front.
Veterans’ Affairs Minister Alan Griffin described the Battle of Fromelles as “the bloodiest 24 hours in our military history, before, or since.
The end of the offensive, which had been deemed unnecessary days earlier by senior commanders, found the Australian troops forced back to their original positions. .”
– Task ahead –
While identifying the soldiers has been central to the recovery process, DNA consultant Dr Peter Jones says many gravestones may remain nameless.
But the organiser of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, David Richardson, says he is hopeful the team will be able to put names on some of the headstones.
“At the very, very best, with everything working completely perfectly, the most we’re likely to match up is about 100,” he said.
“There are so many cemeteries here in France and Belgium and all over the world where we work, where there are unknown soldiers, so I think individual burials for us are just fantastic.
“I think, in a way, that’s a little bit of a bonus,” he said.”
Mr Richardson says it is a relief to see the soldiers reburied.”
Mr Richardson says it is a relief to see the soldiers reburied.
“I’ll be more relieved at the end of February when we’ve buried the full 250, but it’s great to see the cemetery fit for burial,” he said.
“It’s the first new cemetery since World War II, but to build something from scratch on a brand new site in a limited time scale in a wet field in northern France has posed some challenges.”

.Stade Francais prop David Attoub has been hit with a mammoth 70-week ban from rugby union for gouging after what the disciplinary chief who imposed the penalty labelled “the worst act of contact with the eyes that I have had to deal with”.
The ban, which has been backdated to start on December 18, means, as things stand, Attoub cannot play rugby again until April 22, 2011 ruling him out of the remainder of the current European season and most of next term’s campaign.
Attoub, 28, was cited for gouging Ulster lock Stephen Ferris during a stormy European Cup clash on December 12 in Belfast that the Irish province won 23-13.
It is the second-most severe suspension to have been handed out for a gouging offence in the professional era, exceeded only by the two-year ban handed to Richard Nones, a prop with French club Colomiers, in 1999.
Judge Jeff Blackett, the disciplinary supremo at England’s Rugby Football Union (RFU), who heard Attoub’s case said it was the IRB directive and the player’s previous history of gouging, which included a suspension for contact with the eye/eye area in a European match in the 2004/05 season, that saw him impose a penalty which has the potential to end the forward’s career.
Eye gouging is regarded as one of the worst acts of foul play in the 15-man game and the International Rugby Board (IRB), the sport’s global governing body, have instructed disciplinary authorities to come down hard on those found guilty of the offence.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Blackett said: “This is the worst act of contact with the eyes that I have had to deal with: it is a case of deliberate eye gouging”.
Blackett, who found Attoub guilty of the offence on Friday but only passed sentence when the disciplinary hearing reconvened on Monday, determined his action was “in the top-end in the level of seriousness for an offence of contact with the eye/eye area”.
But Blackett’s ruling made clear he accepted the images were genuine and he delivered a damning indictment of Attoub’s conduct.
The initial hearing on December 18 was adjourned until January 15 to allow for more evidence to be gathered after doubts were cast on the veracity of photographs which showed the incident. .
“When he was shown the incriminating photographs and asked to explain what he saw or what was happening he replied that he did not know,” Blackett said.”
The ban follows a 24-week ban given to Attoub’s team-mate and scrum-half Julien Dupuy who also gouged Ferris in the same match.
“It was this evasiveness which satisfied me that his account was less than truthful and that he knew that he had deliberately attacked the eyes of an opponent but was trying to evade responsibility.
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.A 66-year-old French man has been jailed in Abu Dhabi after making a bomb joke on a plane, the French foreign ministry says.
Pensioner Jean-Louis Lioret, who was flying to Bangkok from Paris on Etihad Airways, was arrested after cabin crew overheard him using the word bomb in an exchange with his co-passenger, his brother Michel Lioret said.
During a stopover at Abu Dhabi, Lioret’s neighbour asked him to keep a packet on the other seat next to him as it was empty.
He was taken off the plane on Tuesday and grilled by police and then jailed.
Lioret’s jocular “I hope it’s not a bomb,” was overheard and set off alarm bells.
The French foreign ministry said it was informed of the arrest on Friday and was following the case closely. He was also informed that the packet contained cigarettes and not a bomb.
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.The world economy may not emerge out of crisis in 2010 due to “bubbles” created by the huge injections of money used to keep the financial system operating, World Trade Organisation (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy said Friday.
“You have to be realistic, it is not guaranteed,” the WTO director general said on French radio when asked whether the world economy would recover in 2010. .”
Governments around the world have spent trillions of dollars over the past 18 months avoiding the collapse of the financial system and then trying to claw away from recession.
“In flooding the economic and financial system with public money we have also created bubbles which will have to be absorbed.
“These are the more dynamic, better run, less indebted countries,” Mr Lamy said.
The WTO chief highlighted the dynamism of the emerging economic powers – China, Brazil, India and South Africa – in avoiding the worst of the crisis.
“These are the countries which are from a certain point of view better run than the western economies.”

.Veteran Frenchman Fabrice Santoro has announced he will compete in the Australian Open later this month, making him the first player in four decades to participate in 70 grand slam tournaments.
The 37-year-old – still ranked 68th in the world – had announced his retirement last November following the indoor tournament in Paris.
But he insisted his latest decision did not signal a return to the ATP circuit.
“This is just a very personal thing.
“This decision does not affect my announcement to retire as a professional player,” he said in a statement.”
Santoro, who has been training at Roland-Garros for the past few days, said his intention was not to put away his racquets for good once he retired from the circuit. There is nothing else to it, and it certainly is not a comeback.
“Tennis is my life, my passion,” he said. .
“My decision to retire did not mean I was going to throw my racquets into a cupboard.”
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.Muslim women who wear the full Islamic veil in France will face a possible 750 euro ($1,170) fine, according to a draft bill unveiled by the leader of the parliamentary majority.
Jean-Francois Cope, who heads the governing UMP party in the National Assembly, told Le Figaro newspaper’s weekly magazine that men who force their wives to wear the burqa or niqab could face an even heavier fine.
“The law will address an issue of security,” Mr Cope said in an interview with the magazine.”
The draft legislation will be presented in the next two weeks and should come up for debate in parliament after the March regional elections, he said.
“The proposed measure would prohibit the covering of the face in public places and on the streets, with the exception of special cultural events or carnivals.
“We can measure the modernity of a society by the way it treats and respects women,” he said.
The majority leader, who is also openly campaigning to succeed President Nicolas Sarkozy as the right-wing candidate for the presidency in 2017, said the burqa must be banned to defend women’s rights. .
Many politicians from the left and right have cautioned that a draconian law banning the head-to-toe veil would be difficult to enforce and probably face a challenge in the European rights court.
The burqa debate has heated up ahead of the release at the end of the month of a much-awaited report by a parliamentary panel that has conducted six months of hearings on the issue.
Critics argue that a specific law enacted to ban the full veil would be tantamount to using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.
Mr Sarkozy himself has said that the burqa is not welcome in France but has not stated publicly whether legislation should be enacted.
In the interview, Mr Cope argued that a law would act as a deterrent by sending a “clear message” that France will not allow women to fully cover themselves. Only 1,900 women wear the full veil in France, according to the interior ministry.
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.Frenchman Richard Gasquet has been cleared over a positive cocaine test, after sport’s highest court accepted that he was probably contaminated inadvertently by kissing a woman in a nightclub.
“The player has been exonerated from any fault or negligence,” the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said as it rejected an appeal from the International Tennis Federation (IFT) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), who had asked for a ban of between one and two years.
“On a balance of probability, the CAS panel concluded that it was more likely than not that the player’s contamination with cocaine resulted, as Gasquet always asserted, from kissing a woman in a nightclub in Miami on the day before the anti-doping test and that the player had met the required standards of proof with respect to the way of ingestion.
“I am totally relieved,” Gasquet told French television channel Canal Plus.”
The world number 52, who appeared before a CAS hearing in Lausanne in November, was provisionally suspended in May after a sample he provided in March tested positive for benzoylecgonine, a metabolite of cocaine.
“I thought I had more chances to win grand slams, to beat (Rafael) Nadal at Roland-Garros and (Roger) Federer at Wimbledon than to be tested positive. .
“I am happy to be a hundred per cent cleared.
“I am now ready to go to Australia on December 28, to play two tournaments there and to enter the Australian Open. It was very difficult for me, I’m glad it’s over. I could have done without all this but now I’m happy to be back on the tennis courts.
“Mentally, it was very tough.”
Gasquet, who finished 2007 in the top 10 of the ATP rankings, always claimed his innocence and said he had a hair sample tested by an independent lab which showed no trace of cocaine. My goal is to make it back into the top 10.
In July, an independent tribunal set up under the tennis anti-doping program, found the 23-year-old guilty but ruled that he had been inadvertently contaminated.
In July, an independent tribunal set up under the tennis anti-doping program, found the 23-year-old guilty but ruled that he had been inadvertently contaminated.
The ITF expressed its disappointment at the CAS decision to clear Gasquet.
However, the ITF and WADA appealed to CAS in August for a heavier sanction.
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.Albert Camus’ daughter says critics of the French President have turned her late father into an “anti-Sarkozy missile”, after Nicolas Sarkozy called for the renowned writer be reburied in Paris.
Mr Sarkozy suggested earlier this month that the remains of the author of The Outsider and The Fall should be brought to the Pantheon, the resting place for French national heroes.
The right-wing leader’s idea provoked a largely hostile reaction from France’s intelligentsia, with many pundits arguing that the left-wing existentialist philosopher’s legacy was being exploited for political gain. .
Daughter Catherine Camus said she was shocked by the degree of hatred for the President that was expressed after he suggested her father’s remains be moved from their current resting place in southern France. For me, he represents my country. “I am a republican citizen and the president of the republic was democratically elected.”
But she added that she was surprised that Mr Sarkozy had decided to take an interest in an author noted for his deeply individualist beliefs and for his defence of the downtrodden.
Albert Camus’ son Jean was angered by the Pantheon plan, and denounced it as a cynical bid by Mr Sarkozy to requisition the legacy of a staunchly left-wing thinker.
“Men of power do not usually like Camus,” said Catherine Camus, who has not yet declared whether or not she is in favour of moving her father’s remains to the Pantheon.
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.A rarely seen French secret report on Adolf Hitler is among thousands of documents on 1920s Germany that are about to emerge from obscurity as part of a major overhaul of the French National Archives.
The yellowed, hand-written note from 1924 features a photograph of Hitler in a suit and tie, sporting his trademark side-parting and moustache.
“He is not an idiot but rather a very cunning demagogue,” says the note on Hitler by an anonymous agent. It is part of a treasure trove that had been gathering dust in a Paris mansion for decades.
Part of a huge archive from the period when French troops occupied part of Germany after World War I, the Hitler report was stored separately from the rest of the papers in a metal cabinet where France keeps its most important documents.
The agent presents Hitler as “the German Mussolini” and notes that he runs paramilitary groups “of the fascist type”, but does not raise any particular alarm about the man who would go on to lead Nazi Germany and launch World War II.
Seen only by a very privileged few, the Hitler report has now been extracted from the cabinet and will soon be available for historians to study, along with tens of thousands of other papers dating back to the French occupation of Germany. .
– ‘Racist’ –
The papers, which include everything from spy reports on politicians to details of German industrial techniques that the French hoped to appropriate, were not analysed or indexed.
Those documents were transported to Paris in 1930 and have been stored ever since in the bowels of the National Archives, housed in a magnificent early 18th century residence in the heart of the historic Marais district.
All that changed four years ago, when the Archives launched a conservation project to examine every single one of the papers and create a comprehensive index that will be posted online.
As a result, they remained hidden in more than 6,000 boxes, an unmanageable mass of raw material, inaccessible to historians and slowly deteriorating as paper-clips rusted, dust accumulated and ink faded from sheets as fine as cigarette paper.
She said the newly organised archive would be moved to a new state-of-the-art storage facility which is being built in a Paris suburb.
“On both sides of the Rhine, there was a very strong demand from historians to work on the inter-war period, and particularly the roots of the Second World War,” Isabelle Neuschwander, director of the Archives, said.
As well as Hitler, the French agents in Germany scrutinised other men who would go on to become powerful Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler. There, the papers will be kept in much safer conditions and will be accessible to any researcher.
– Industrial espionage –
Also under the French spotlight was Konrad Adenauer, the then mayor of Cologne who would become the architect of the West German state after World War II.
The Himmler note goes straight to the point: the first word is “racist”.
“Competent but drawn to subordinate roles,” the note says. But whoever wrote the Adenauer report did not take the full measure of the man.
“That is not what interests me most.
Michele Conchon, an archivist who has been working full-time on the German papers for the past four years, said that while the most eye-catching pieces were the reports on famous Nazis, they were not the most valuable to historians.
She mentioned reports on violent incidents in which ordinary Germans showed their anger at the French occupation, burning French flags or attacking isolated soldiers guarding buildings. This archive is extremely rich in what it can teach us on daily life in Germany between the wars,” she said, surrounded by boxes of dusty files.
“There are reports of factory visits that were probably carried out with the aim of industrial espionage,” she said.
“There are reports of factory visits that were probably carried out with the aim of industrial espionage,” she said.
The secret service reports even offer insights into the lives of ordinary Germans – and into the nervousness of the French, who kept close tabs on German public opinion.
Thus, a report on an obscure schoolteacher, named as Mr Hinze, reveals surprisingly close scrutiny.
“Schoolteacher, 31, neutral, no obvious prejudices, content with our occupation which ensures order, hopes to see us go when peace will be signed,” says the report on Mr Hinze.
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