Clijsters sweeps aside Kutuzova at U.S. Open

Former world number one Kim Clijsters made a triumphant return to the U.S. Open at Flushing Meadows as she routed Viktoriya Kutuzova of the Ukraine in their first round match on Monday. The Belgian ace has never lost to a player ranked outside the top 10 at the hard court grand slam and offered Kutuzova little respite during a 54-minute match

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Investigators find flight data recorder from Comoros crash

Search teams have found the flight data recorder from the Yemenia Airways plane that crashed off the Comoros Islands in June, killing 152 people, the chief investigator said Friday. An operation to retrieve the recorder has begun, said a statement from investigator Ali Abdou Mohamed

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Pakistan foils suicide terror plot

Pakistani forces in the last month foiled a planned attack on the parliament building, the intelligence agency and other federal institutions, the country’s interior minister told CNN Sunday. More than 600 firefighters and soldiers — aided by residents — used whatever was at their disposal to bring the blaze under control as the flames inched closer to the capital from the northeast edges of the city

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Five great travel booking sites

The following five sites have proven the most consistently useful for the editors of Budget Travel, who do thousands of searches a year. Dohop.com Strictly for booking plane trips entirely outside of the U.S., such as a flight between Paris and Rome. The site runs simultaneous searches of multiple airports serving the same city — five airports in London, for instance — and it retrieves fares from no-frills independent carriers like EasyJet and Ryanair, which many better-known travel sites overlook.

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Armstrong brings Scottish town to a standstill

Seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong brought a Scottish town center to a standstill on Tuesday when hundreds of people joined him for a group bike ride. The seven-times Tour de France winner used social networking site Twitter to invite fans to take part in the event in Paisley, Scotland and — as a result — around 200 people gathered in the town’s High Street. Fans took photographs and asked for autographs from the American and the watching crowd applauded and cheered as the group set off on their ride

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Iran releases French woman, officials say

Iran has released a French academic from prison, though it’s not clear when Clotilde Reiss can return home, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office announced Sunday. Reiss, 24, is the second French woman facing charges as part of mass trials in Iran who was released on bond.

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The Dilemma of ‘Virginity’ Restoration

Once lost, virginity can never be replaced — but modern medicine now offers women a near-perfect physical simulation of their lost innocence. Hymenoplasty, the surgical reconstruction of the hymen broken during a women’s first experience of intercourse, or, increasingly, during demanding exercise or as a result of a collision or fall by women who’ve never had sex, has prompted a growing number of young betrothed women in France to make a last-ditch attempt to avoid the humiliation, repudiation, and possibly violence that could result from husbands and families discovering from blood-free bridal sheets that their wedding night had not been their first sexual experience.

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