Chelsea striker Nicolas Anelka said on Thursday that he does not miss France national football team and he is happy to be out of international football.
Bayern Munich’s France international Franck Ribery apologised on Monday for his behaviour in the run up to and during a horrible 2010 season.
Football’s lawmaking body, the International Football Association Board (IFAB), has banned the wearing of snoods Saturday.
Real Madrid coach Jose Mourinho has been banned for two matches and fined by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) on Tuesday for improper conduct following an incident where two of his players received suspicious red cards in a Champions League game with Ajax.
A statement on the UEFA website read: “The Spanish club’s coach Jose Mourinho has been suspended from coaching activities for two UEFA club competition matches, of which the second is deferred for a probationary period of three years. He was also fined 40,000 euros.”
UEFA specified that the punishments were for “improper conduct”.
Besides Mourinho, two Real Madrid players Xabi Alonso and Sergio Ramos were found guilty of improper conduct and were fined 20,000 euros each by UEFA, while Real’s goalkeeper Iker Casillas and reserve keeper Jerzy Dudek were also fined after being captured on television apparently passing messages to them from the dugout. Casillas was fined 10,000 euros and Dudek ordered to pay 5,000 euros.
Nine-time European champions Real Madrid were also fined 120,000 euros over the incident and they can appeal in three days.
Mourinho was banned by UEFA for two matches in 2005 when he was the coach of Chelsea.
Barcelona’s goalkeeper Jose Manuel Pinto has been banned by UEFA for the next two Champions League matches over “gross unsporting conduct” during the Spanish side’s 2-0 defeat of Copenhagen.
Pinto, 34, “whistled to stop a promising attack from striker Cesar Santin in the UEFA Champions League Group D match” on October 20.
The disciplinary committee of European football’s governing body read a statement on Friday: “FC Barcelona goalkeeper Jose Pinto has been suspended for two UEFA club competition matches by the UEFA control and disciplinary body. Pinto was found guilty of gross unsporting conduct. The control and disciplinary body considered that he whistled to stop a promising attack from striker Cesar Santin in the UEFA Champions League Group D match against FC Copenhagen at Camp Nou on 20 October.
“He will miss the Spanish side’s next two UEFA Champions League group stage games against Copenhagen in Denmark next Tuesday, and against Panathinaikos in Greece on 24 November. An appeal may be lodged against the ruling within three days of the dispatch of the reasoning for the decision.”
Category : Sport
The Portuguese Football Federation (FPF) has banned Portugal national team coach Carlos Queiroz for a month on Thursday.
Queiroz was accused of insulting two European anti-dopting qualifiers who had come to test players on May 16 before the squad flew out to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Queiroz, 57, was also fined 1,000 euros as the FPF’s disciplinary committee found him guilty of misconduct.
The former Real Madrid coach will now miss next month’s opening Euro 2012 qualifiers against Cyprus and Norway.
Queiroz, who has spent two years as Portugal coach, fought the charges and brought Manchester United coach and former colleague Sir Alex Ferguson as a character witness.
The decision came after Queiroz guided Portugal through a disappointing World Cup campaign in South Africa. Portugal failed to show good performances during World Cup.
Italian municipal police fined a woman 500 euros ($650) for wearing a full Islamic veil in a street in the northern city of Novara. The municipality banned the burqa in public spaces in January according to a local official quoted by the AFP agency.
“City police ticketed her last night and she will have to pay a 500-euro (650-dollar) fine,” Mauro Franzinelli of the Novara municipal police told AFP.
“As far as I know this is a first in Italy,” he said adding that the woman could appeal.
Novara, in Italy’s northeastern Piedmont region, is a stronghold of the anti-immigration Northern League, a key party in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative government.
The woman, a Tunisian national, was stopped by police officers outside a post office in the company of her husband. When her husband refused to have her identified by male officers they called in a patrol comprising a woman officer.
“City hall adopted a decree in late January banning the burqa in public places and their vicinity, which is based on a commentary by the interior ministry who received a copy of the draft,” said Franzinelli, who is also a local Northern League official.
Covering one’s face — with a veil or a motorcycle helmet — in public has been banned in Italy since 1975.
Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf”, was added to a list of books that are banned in Russia for their extremist content. The book tells the story of Hitler’s early years and exposes elements of his anti-Semitic political ideology.
The book “has been freely available up to now on several websites and was also sold semi-legally by booksellers, since it was not banned,” the Russian prosecutor general’s office said in a statement.
The lengthy 1925 book by the German Nazi leader, whose title translates as “My Struggle,” tells the story of his early years and exposes elements of his anti-Semitic political ideology.
Russia introduced the ban after prosecutors in the central Russian city of Ufa found the book freely available. A city court ruled that the book was extremist, a decision that put it on the banned books list.
In a complex legal situation, Russia already has a law which automatically qualifies all books written by leaders of the German Nazi Party as extremist, but “Mein Kampf” was not explicitly named as a banned book, putting it in a legal grey area.
The Russian justice ministry maintains a list of publications that have been defined as extremist materials on its website, and the sale or distribution of them is punishable with a fine.
The list, which currently has 573 entries, includes numerous Islamic texts and magazines distributed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as a book about Hitler by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Hundreds of women have rallied outside Yemen’s parliament to show support for a law banning child marriages.
The law being proposed would set a minimum age for girls to be married at 17 and 18 for boys. But some conservative Muslims are against the law being passed. The rally comes days after thousands of women protested against it.
The government proposed the law after the marriage of an eight-year-old girl to a 30-year-old man was annulled. The girl, Nujood Mohammed Ali, was outside the parliament in Sanaa among the women at the rally. She was quoted by news agency Agence France Presse saying she was protesting in the hope that the law would go through without any changes.
But some MPs have submitted requests for the law’s review.
On Monday a group of Islamic clerics issued a decree condemning the law, and said its supporters were apostates. Some of the signatories of the decree were lawmakers sitting on the committee charged with amending the law, it was reported.
The speaker of Parliament, Yehya al-Raei, said it was possible that the law would be changed to maintain the age limit, but punishments for breaking the law including prison sentences and fines would be cancelled.
The committee is expected to make a final decision on the legislation in April.
Campaigners say young married girls having children is a factor in high maternal mortality rates. The practice is also the cause of high illiteracy rates among women, as young girls’ studies are interrupted.
Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. More than a quarter of women there are married before the age of 15, campaigners say.