Greatest Hitter: Roger Federer

On June 7, as Roger Federer was on his way to equaling Pete Sampras’ record of 14 Grand Slam victories by winning the French Open, James Blake and a group of fellow pros watched on a television in the players’ lounge at the Aegon Championships at The Queen’s Club in London, a warm-up event to Wimbledon.

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Returning Sharapova seeded for Wimbledon

Former champion Maria Sharapova has been seeded for next week’s Wimbledon championships. The Russian has only recently returned to action after a serious shoulder injury, but despite performing solidly in the French Open and reaching the semifinals of the WTA grasscourt event in Birmingham last week, she remained 59th in the rankings

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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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In Africa, the Death of a Big Man Is Reminder of Continent’s Worst Excesses

As Gabon begins a month of mourning and condolences pour in for President Omar Bongo, the world’s longest serving President, who died on Monday at 73 in his 42nd year in power, it’s worth remembering that Bongo was precisely the kind of leader Gabon, and Africa, could have done without. Gabon has a tiny population and vast oil reserves, and after four decades of exporting hundreds of billions of dollars of crude, the biggest testament to the corruption and ineptitude of Bongo’s rule is that he somehow contrived not to turn his country into an African Kuwait. A third of all Gabonese still live on less than $2 a day, and as the oil fields begin to dry up, Bongo’s subjects are facing up to the reality that he sacrificed the country’s future to fund his own fantastically opulent lifestyle.

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