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LONDON: London 2012 will be the biggest Paralympics in history, with 19 more nations taking part than four years ago, organizers said Monday as they began counting down the last 100 days until the Games. Some 4,200 competitors will take part — up from 3,951 in Beijing in 2008 — and 16 nations will be making their Paralympic debut including …

LAND’S END, United Kingdom: Sailor Ben Ainslie was the first torchbearer as the Olympic flame began its 70-day journey around Britain and Ireland on Saturday ahead of the 2012 London Games. The flame arrived in Britain from Greece on Friday and was flown to Land’s End, the southwesterly tip of England, on Saturday by a Royal Navy helicopter before it …

ATHENS: David Beckham says he’s honored to have the chance to escort the Olympic flame from Greece to London for the 2012 Summer Games. The former English national team captain and current star for the Los Angeles Galaxy toured a school in Athens on Friday and expressed his pride in bringing a symbol of peace to his homeland. But what …

THE HAGUE: Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic went on trial Wednesday accused of carrying out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and Europe’s worst massacre since World War II.“Ratko Mladic assumed the mantle of the criminal goal of ethnically cleansing Bosnia,” prosecutor Dermot Groome told judges as the trial opened at the Yugoslav war crimes court in The Hague.Mladic, 70, has been indicted on …

DAMASCUS: The president of the Syrian Olympic Committee says the war-torn country will send 20 sports officials and 10 athletes to the London Games. Gen. Mowaffak Joumaa says 10 Syrian athletes have either qualified or received wild-card invitations to compete in swimming, track and field, weightlifting, boxing, equestrian and shooting during the games. Joumaa says he and other sports officials …

LONDON: The Olympic stadium, the beating heart of the Games when the world’s greatest athletes come to London in 82 days’ time, was formally opened on Saturday by a nine-year-old girl who lives down the road. Niamh Clarke-Willis, who can see the Olympic Park from her home in the east London borough of Hackney, stepped out into the infield of …

BEIJING: Who says table tennis cannot be sexy? German player Timo Boll is the biggest threat to China’s dominance in the sport at the London Olympics, but it’s his good looks that make him more popular in Beijing than in Berlin. Boll is a heartthrob in China. “Sometimes in China I feel a little bit like rock star, but we …

LONDON: Rupert Murdoch is unfit to run a major international company, MPs said on Tuesday, finding him responsible for a culture of illegal phone hacking that has convulsed his News Corporation media empire. Pulling few punches, the MPs listed failings of the 81-year-old News Corp chief, his son James and a company they said had showed “willful blindness” about the scale of hacking that …