South Africa assistant coach Dick Muir admitted he had never seen such a poor performance from a Springbok front five as the world champions went down to a shock defeat to Leicester.

Phil Mickelson birdied the last hole on Saturday to take a two-stroke lead over Tiger Woods and Nick Watney at the HSBC Champions, setting up an enticing finale in the World Golf Championship event.

Global banking giant HSBC said it was renewing its sponsorship of the Women's Champions tournament for the next three years, but prize money would be slashed.

Australia coach Robbie Deans will be under particular pressure to deliver a victory when the Wallabies face an injury-hit England at Twickenham on Saturday in the first leg of their grand slam tour.

An in-form Didier Drogba is capable of ruffling the feathers of even the most confident defences.

British challenger David Haye insists he will be the first fighter to knock out WBA heavyweight champion Nikolai Valuev here on Saturday.

LeBron James scored a game-high 33 points and nine assists to power the Cleveland Cavaliers to their sixth-consecutive victory over the New York Knicks with a 100-91 win.

Italy will head into the Fed Cup final against the United States here this weekend as the overwhelming favourites with both Williams sisters missing from the visitors' line-up.

Renault have held an emergency board meeting in Paris to discuss pulling out of Formula One, on the same day as Toyota announced it was also quitting the sport, according to reports.

Formula One was left reeling Wednesday as Toyota became the latest automaker to quit the glamour sport in response to the economic crisis, just days after tyre manufacturer Bridgestone pulled out.

Japan's Toyota Motor announced Wednesday it was quitting Formula One racing, joining an exodus of Japanese automakers from the sport due to the global economic crisis.

Toyota Motor was expected to announce on Wednesday it is quitting Formula One, joining an exodus of Japanese automakers from the multi-million dollar sport due to the global economic crisis.

Japan's Toyota Motor is to quit Formula One (F1) in a bid to slash costs as the company battles to cope with the fallout from the global recession, a newspaper said Wednesday.

The Williams Formula One team announced on Monday that their drivers for next year will be veteran Brazilian Rubens Barrichello and German rookie Nico Hulkenberg.

Tyre maker Bridgestone's exit from Formula One is part of an exodus by Japanese automotive industry giants from the multi-million-dollar sport amid the worst industry slump in decades.

Two-times world champion Spaniard Fernando Alonso said farewell to Renault with a solid if disappointing drive to 14th in Sunday's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix - and then expressed confidence in the future he faces at Ferrari.

Lesa France Kennedy stuck with the family business. Now she's the most powerful woman in sports.

Tiger Woods has been making history on and off the course since he joined the PGA Tour in 1996. First up was a record $40 million contract from Nike. The following year he won the Masters by a record 12 strokes, becoming the youngest winner ever and first black player to take the title. His career has been packed full of accomplishments, including major titles (14), annual money titles (9) and Player of the Year awards (9).

China's Fujian Province seems an unlikely place to spawn success in the fresh vegetable business. It's mountainous and craggy, and barely even rates a mention in a recent book on Chinese agriculture. Sun Shaofeng personally isn't the most likely of entrepreneurs, either, having started out as a government bureaucrat. Yet Sun has built China Green of Xiamen into one of the country's best-performing food producers. Total revenue has been increasing by 20% a year, though business this year has been hit by the global recession. Sales in the 12 months to April, the latest figures available, increased by 22% from a year earlier to $227 million.

Yoshinori Shirono has a dependable route to profit: the vanity of women. "Japanese women will save on clothes, food or the cash they give to their husband or father, but they will spend on cosmetics until the end," says Shirono, the dermatologist who started the medically based "cosmeceutical" brand Dr. Ci:Labo in Tokyo ten years ago.

The qualifying stages for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa are drawing to a close. Eleven national teams have already punched their tickets to the tournament next year, including the host country, and dozens more are still scrambling for the remaining 21 spots.

In the late 18th century, British poet William Blake lamented the "dark satanic mills" and squalid urban centers spawned by the industrial revolution. One might expect the recently released American Community Survey to show that, more than 200 years later, large cities are just as filthy as they've always been.

The comeback may be the most thrilling event in sports. One team or player is left for dead, done, kaput, down too many points or games to come back. We are rational beings. We like to believe what we see, that when a game looks over, it is indeed over.

This year's list of the best small- and midsize companies throughout the Asia Pacific region is chock-full of survival stories and lessons for entrepreneurs. Unprecedented dislocations in the global economy disrupted supply chains over the past 12 months, froze lines of credit, depleted consumer coffers and sent business spending into hibernation. The 64 companies returning from last year are a testament to fearless management; 136 new entrants have seized opportunities arising from the economic uncertainty.