Flight 447 mystery likely to cast shadow over Paris Air Show

The world’s premier air show takes place in Paris next week, with the recent loss of Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean likely to cast a shadow over the event. The annual Paris Air Show at Le Bourget, which this year celebrates its 100th anniversary, gives the air transport industry the chance to promote the latest innovations in aerospace technology and attract buyers for both commercial and military aircraft. Manufacturing giants Boeing and Airbus are two of the most high-profile organizations at the show as a result of their stranglehold over the commercial airliner market

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Platini hits out at Ronaldo Real deal

Michel Platini, the president of the governing body for European football (UEFA), has hit out at the large fee offered by Real Madrid for the Portugal playmaker Cristiano Ronaldo. English Premier League side Manchester United announced on June 11 that they had accepted a world record transfer fee of $130M for the 24-year-old from the Spanish side

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Air France Flight 447: Can the Crash Be Solved Without the Black Box?

As a French nuclear submarine arrived off the coast of Brazil to join the effort to locate the black box from Air France Flight 447 on Thursday, aviation experts stressed the necessity of recovering those cockpit recorders in order to learn what exactly brought down the Airbus A330 and the 228 people on board. In past inquiries into airline disasters, investigators have been able to figure out the cause by piecing together clues from the wreckage itself, sometimes without information from the black box. But after 10 days of searching, the authorities combing what’s believed to be Flight 447’s crash site, some 700 miles out to sea, have come up with only 41 bodies and relatively little of the plane’s wreckage.

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United accept record $130M offer for Ronaldo

Manchester United have accepted a world-record $130 million offer for Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid. The English champions have given the big-spending Spanish giants permission to talk to the World Player of the Year, according to the United Web site. United said on Thursday that the Portugal winger had again expressed his desire to leave Old Trafford, and the club now expect the deal to be concluded by June 30.

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U.S. dad’s custody case returns to Brazilian appeals court

Brazil’s highest court said Wednesday it does not have jurisdiction over who should have custody of a U.S.-born 9-year-old boy — his Brazilian stepfather or his father in the United States. The high court’s ruling sends the ongoing case back to an appeals court in Rio de Janeiro. In the unanimous vote, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court said it could not rule over The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, of which Brazil is a signatory.

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‘Black box’ could hold answer to plane crash mystery

The "black box" is actually an orange cylinder — about 13 pounds of metal wrapped around a stack of memory chips and designed to withstand the force of being slammed high-speed into a brick wall. One such device — currently sitting more than two miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean — is now the object of a massive international search and could hold the answer to why Air France Flight 447 mysteriously plunged into the sea off the coast of Brazil last week with 228 people on board. “These record many, many parameters of the flight — the aircraft, its altitude, even the amount of force that one of the pilots might put on a pedal,” John Perry Fish, an underwater recovery expert, told CNN

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Kaka has medical ahead of $100M Real deal

Kaka moved closer to a reported $100 million move to Real Madrid on Monday when the AC Milan star had a medical in Brazil at the request of the Spanish Primera Liga giants, his Federation said. The 27-year-old midfielder is currently on international duty ahead of Brazil’s World Cup qualifier against Paraguay on Wednesday but was released for the medical tests in the north-eastern city of Recife. Kaka is set to become the first of the new wave of ‘galacticos’ brought together under the leadership of returning club president Florentino Perez.

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What’s SUP? A Surf Sport That’s Bucking the Recession

Stand-up paddle surfing may sound like a scene from a screwball comedy, but no one’s laughing in a sports and fitness industry that has hit the recession skids as hard as any other business. SUP, as it’s called for short, looks exactly as it sounds: you stand on a large surfboard and propel yourself forward with a paddle. But, unlike traditional surfing, you don’t have to wait for the waves.

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