Concerns about large-scale marine pollution, fuelled by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, are set to be heightened by a new development in exploitation of the oceans: deep-sea mining.
The Chinese government has just lodged the first application to mine for minerals under the seabed in international waters, in this case on a ridge in the Indian Ocean 1,700 metres (more than 5,000ft) below the surface.
The Chinese are hoping to recover valuable metals such as copper, nickel and cobalt – used in mobile phones, laptops and batteries – as well as gold and silver, in an area of currently inactive "hydrothermal vents", underwater geysers driven by volcanic activity.
Some of the vents, known as "black smokers", are black chimney-like structures which shelter their own ecosystems of little-known creatures, while emitting a cloud of hot, black material containing high levels of sulphur-bearing minerals, or sulphides.
Having explored the area using remotely operated underwater vehicles, the Chinese want to mine the sulphide deposits of a region of seabed in the south-west Indian Ocean for the rich mineral ores they contain. They have already applied to do so to the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the Jamaica-based body set up under the 1982 UN Convention on The Law of the Sea to deal with the liabilities relating to seabed exploitation and the environmental damage it may cause.
The application, which will be heard at a meeting next April, is the first to be made for permission to mine in international waters, but it is likely to be followed by many more, especially if the Chinese succeed. A major seabed sulphide-mining project is already under way in the waters of Papua New Guinea, run by the Toronto-based company Nautilus Minerals.
The environmental worries thrown up by the prospect of deep-sea mining are considerable, not least after the Gulf oil spill, which has become an intractable problem owing to the depth of the seabed where the well is sited. It has become clear that once something goes wrong at such a depth – in this case 1,500 metres, or nearly 5,000ft – putting it right is immeasurably more difficult than at the surface.
Although no one knows exactly what damage a deep-sea mine would do to the marine ecosystem, experts have no doubt that removing a considerable part of the sea floor would cause a major disturbance.
Not only that, but plumes of sediment – which may well be toxic – could have an impact over a much wider area, especially for filter-feeding marine organisms, which are common on the seabed. Such plumes might also block out light, hindering the development of plankton.
"At the mouths of these hydrothermal vents are some of the world's richest but least-known ecosystems, and the potential for conflict between commerce and conservation is huge," said Charles Clover, author of The End of The Line, the best-selling indictment of over-fishing, which has been made into a widely praised film.
The Chinese were taking it very seriously, Mr Clover said. "The reality is, they are identifying gold mines under the sea. The Chinese have played this by the book, but they lodged their application on the very first day it was possible, on the first day of the compliance regime for mining sulphides, which had taken the ISA seven years to establish."
Richard Harrington of the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) expressed similar concerns: "This is seriously deep exploitation of our sea floor and in the first instance we would question if this strategy would really be economically viable," he said.
"We've seen how difficult it has been to cap the oil in the Gulf – would the risk of an accident be worth taking? MCS is currently campaigning for marine protected areas to ensure protection of the sea bed around UK waters, where the damage to the marine environment from activities such as dredging and trawling are all too obvious.
"Deep sea mining would take this sort of damage to a new level in the wider oceans. Conditions at this depth are normally very stable, and any mining damage would impact the environment for a very long time."
drive from www.independent.co.uk
Remember the dotcom boom? When all canny investors needed to do was add a ".com" to the name of their company to watch stock soar? And to think that all of this took place in a world where dial-up still dominated. Where a business's investors, customers, even founders, would have to clunk their way around the world wide web (as it was then known), waiting for pages to load, inch-by-inelegant-inch, all while keeping one eye on the clock (the internet was expensive, after all) and batting away those around them who wanted to make a call but couldn't because the only phone line in the house was being occupied.
It was, in many ways, another world. Certainly, it was for those first explorative entrepreneurs who, in the murky early years of e-business, carved out their camp on the web's frontier – the Lastminute.coms, the GeoCities, the Boo.coms.
For some, the experiment paid off. Sabeer Bhatia, an India-born entrepreneur who, after a stint at Apple and the start-up company Firepower Systems, co-founded Hotmail with a former colleague and then went on to sell his business – one of the first web-based email systems, distinguished by its groundbreaking decision not to charge users for the service – for $400m [£253.8m] on his 29th birthday. For others, it didn't. When Boo.com turned to bust it did so in now-notorious style: after eating through $135m of venture capital in the first 18 months, and amid tales of Gatsby-esque spending on the part of the fashion e-tailer's Swedish founders, the firm was declared bankrupt, leaving more than 400 contractors and staff redundant.
It might have been dismissed as a one-off, the sudden dissolution of riches a kind of modern morality tale of excess. But it wasn't. The world of the web millionaire continued to grow and, a decade on, stories of bright ideas leading to great riches abound. YouTube received its unceremonious baptism in 2005 when three PayPal employees uploaded a video of a trip to the zoo. All pixelated footage and bumbling narration ("the cool thing about elephants is that they have really really, really, really long ... um ... trunks."), it was the video that launched countless others. Now more than two billion are watched every day and it was the promise of viewing figures like these that saw Google snap up the company for $1.65bn just 18 months after it first launched. Shortly before YouTube's birth, in what is now internet legend, a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg had launched thefacebook.com (later facebook.com), from his dorm room. These days he can be found conversing with Prime Ministers via video link, and is personally worth an estimated $4bn.
Crucially, these were a different breed of dotcoms, distinguished from the ill-fated experiments of the Nineties by their durability. Founders got rich quick and stayed it. The relative security of these operations – not to mention the sums they have earned their creators – has revived the idea that the internet is paved with gold. Nowadays, every Tom, Dick, and Harry can (or thinks they can) have a go. Enter the words "internet millionaire" into Google, and you are directed to endless ranks of advice-peddling websites claiming to have the answer, whether it assumes the form of five secrets of successful e-trepreneurs or 50 (are all of these sites run by millionaires? Is setting one up the answer?). The same is true in the bookstore: shelves heave under the weight of advice manuals. But to what avail?
As founder of the online auction site QXL, Tim Jackson rode the first wave of dotcoms with mixed success (the business had the dubious honour of admittance to the so-called "99 per cent club" of businesses that lost 99 per cent of their value when the dotcom bubble burst, though it eventually recovered) and is now involved in competitions site Miss Win It.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
We tend to celebrate Easter with bucketfuls of chocolate eggs – but we often forget about the Easter feast. So this week I've been cooking up delicious Easter lunch recipes, including spring lamb (often slaughtered in Mediterranean countries to mark the start of the festivities), wild rabbit, real eggs (not of the chocolate variety) and even ricciarelli – little Tuscan biscuits which go down a treat with coffee.
Triple roast of spring lamb
Serves about 8
If you are thinking of doing a spring lamb roast, why not serve three different cuts so your guests can appreciate the flavours from different parts of the animal?
1 shoulder of spring lamb
1 eight-bone best end of spring lamb
1 leg of spring lamb, boned and tied
A little vegetable oil for frying
4 heads of new season garlic
A handful of rosemary
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Preheat the oven to 160C/gas mark 3. Season the shoulder of lamb, heat a heavy frying pan with a little vegetable oil and brown the lamb on all sides on a high heat, then place in a roasting tray. Do the same with the leg and best end of lamb but put to one side. Halve the heads of garlic and place in the roasting tray, then scatter the rosemary over. Slow roast the shoulder for 2 hours (removing the garlic after 45 minutes), basting every so often; then remove from the oven, cover with foil and keep warm.
Turn the oven up for about 10 minutes until it reaches 200C/gas mark 6. Place the leg of lamb in the same roasting tray and cook for 30 minutes, basting every so often. Then place the best end in the tray with the fat down and cook for another 15-20 minutes, keeping the leg and best end nice and pink.
It's difficult to put an exact time on the best end and leg, as your spring lamb is going to vary in size somewhat, but the idea is really to keep them just pink.
Serve the three joints either carved and on a serving dish with the garlic, or if you have a large wooden carving board you could place the joints on the board and let your guests carve for themselves.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
The world is heading for the next major climate change conference in Cancun later this year on course for global warming of up to 3.5C in the coming century, a series of scientific analyses suggest. The failure of last December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen means that cuts in carbon emissions pledged by the international community will not be enough to keep the anticipated warming within safe limits.
Two analyses of the Copenhagen Accord and its pledges, by Dr Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and by the Climate Action Tracker website, suggest that, with the cuts that are currently promised under Copenhagen, the world will still warm by 3.5C by 2100. Such a rise would be likely to have disastrous effects on agricultural production, water availability, natural ecosystems and sea-level rise across the world, producing tens of millions of refugees.
A month ago, in its annual State of the Climate report, published in conjunction with the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) listed 10 separate indicators of a warming planet, seven of them rising – ranging from air temperature over land and humidity to sea level – and three of them declining: Arctic sea-ice, glaciers, and spring snow cover. "The scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable," NOAA said.
Cancun, or "COP 16" as it is officially known, will again see ministers and officials from nearly 200 nations grapple with the politics of global warming, but no one thinks they will be able to close a widening breach in the world's defences against dangerously rising temperatures – the "gigatonne gap".
A gigatonne is a billion tonnes of carbon, and the emissions cuts currently promised by the nations of the world in the Copenhagen Accord – the last-minute agreement patched together by leaders after the conference in the Danish capital all but collapsed – will mean that, by 2020, when global emissions should be on a firmly downward trend, they will be several gigatonnes too high to limit the warming to C above the pre-industrial level. This is widely considered the most that human society can stand without serious consequences.
Yet the international community does not seem any closer to consensus on the need to make further reductions in carbon and at Cancun, which takes place from 29 November to 10 December, it is at best side issues on which any progress will be made.
Today, the Coalition's Climate Change Secretary, the Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, will travel to Berlin to discuss strengthening the EU climate target in advance of the Cancun meeting from 20 per cent to 30 per cent, with his German and French counterparts, Norbert Röttgen and Jean-Louis Borloo.
Mr Huhne told The Independent: "There's hard work ahead to maintain and build on the level of commitment embodied in the Copenhagen Accord and to rebuild the credibility of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process.
"We in the EU still need to finalise our positions in advance of COP 16, but I think there's a real chance the negotiations could take important steps forward in Cancun, in particular to implement parts of what was agreed in Copenhagen and to work towards the global deal the world needs."
He added: "It's the UK's view – and one shared by my French and German counterparts – that the EU should raise its ambition and that the economic case for doing so stacks up.
"Cutting emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 would be a game-changer in shifting investment into new clean technologies, generating jobs and growth in supply chains across our economies. The great risk for Europe is in waking up late to these opportunities and losing out to other major blocs who are already eyeing up market share."
It is hard to exaggerate the dire effect which the failure at Copenhagen has had both on the climate change negotiating process itself, and on the belief of those involved that an effective climate deal might be possible.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
Denmark's Caroline Wozniacki is the top seed at the US Open in Flushing Meadows. Photograph: Fred Beckham/AP
All of a sudden – or not – nobody much cares about the women's side of this US Open. Serena Williams was going to be hot here for all the wrong reasons after her boorish outburst at a linesperson last year, but apparently she cut her foot on broken glass in a Munich restaurant after winning Wimbledon and neither the injured party nor anyone else wants to talk about the "incident", leaving the field to Caroline Wozniacki and Kim Clijsters, a pair of foreigners probably as relevant to New Yorkers as the United Nations building down on First Avenue.
Locally, people are saying the right things. It does not do to diss the women's game on Planet Tennis. But when Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times broke ranks last week to write: "It's like the Somme out there", in describing the casualties that have laid waste to the women's side of the US Open, he did more than get things slightly out of proportion. He got it right.
Without Williams and Justine Henin, alongside a limping Venus Williams and Clijsters, the women's event lacks buzz, except for a bit of flag-waving. If you want a measure of it, consider this: Melanie Oudin, a 17-year-old from Marietta, Georgia, has won one match in a major since she grabbed headlines last year by reaching the quarters here – yet she has three new sponsorship deals worth $1m. She has done little since but still attracts disproportionate attention.
Wozniacki is the rightful favourite. She said during the Pilot Pen tournament at Yale last week she will apply to do business management at the university this year, an unusual departure for a full-time professional athlete. It is unlikely they will be any less obstructive than her first-round opponent at Flushing Meadows, the American Chelsey Gullickson. Clijsters should have little trouble getting past Greta Arn.
As for the British, Elena Baltacha qualifieddirectly, and plays Petra Martic. Anne Keothavong has Chan Jung-jan first-up. Laura Robson, 16, last night again came within sight of becoming the youngest British player to qualify for a slam when Spain's Nuria Llagostera Vives came from a set down to ruin the fairytale. Veves, rated 126th in the world, won their final qualifying match 2-6, 6-4, 6-3.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
Thousands of holidaymakers heading to British beaches this summer will be cheered by a major government report into the state of the UK's seas. Coastal waters are getting cleaner, fish stocks are improving and species diversity in estuaries is increasing, according to the most authoritative examination ever carried out of UK seas.
But while the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs study boasts of "significant improvements" since the last such report in 2005, it also paints a picture of an environment being rapidly affected by a warming world. Seas around the British Isles are higher, warmer and more acid, it says, and coastal litter levels are at a record high.
The sea surface temperature of UK waters has risen on average by between 0.5 and 1C since the 1870s, which could affect the fish that appear on our plates in future. Of the 330 species found around the UK, cold-water species such as cod are in retreat, while warm-water fish including red-mullet, seabass and John Dory are spreading rapidly.
Fish stocks are improving overall, partly due to fishing reductions brought about by European Union quotas, despite criticism from marine conservation groups that the quotas are set too high to maintain fish stocks. The proportion of fin-fish stocks in UK waters being harvested sustainably has risen from 10% in the early 1990s to 25% in 2007.
However, the report notes that a large majority of stocks are still being fished at unsustainable levels. Fish are simultaneously being hit by warming waters, which are causing the cold and warm water zooplankton that fish feed on to move north. The warm water zooplankton tend to be smaller and less nutritious, affecting fish larvae and stocks.
Climate change is also causing sea levels to rise, with the mean sea level rising by 1.4mm per year in the 20th century. While slower than global growth of 1.7mm per year in the same period, the rise has not always been steady - in the 1990s, it was going up by 3-4mm each year. More coastal erosion and more flooding are likely to occur as a result, says the report, with the Humber estuary and Norfolk coast particularly at risk.
UK waters are also not exempt from the global trend of ocean acidifiation due to higher levels of dissolved CO2. This leads to harmful effects for marine life that rely on calcification, such as crustacea and molluscs. But the authors of the report admit the lack of a baseline for pH levels makes it hard to measure the rate of our acidifying seas.
Levels of pollution continue to drop since Defra's research in 2005, including heavy metals such as lead and mercury. However, there are still some localised problems such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) which, while stabilising nationally, are still found in places at levels that affect wildlife, including harbour porpoises. Litter levels doubled, though, between 1994 and 2007, with 2,000 items per kilometre of coastline. Litter was even found at a depth of 1,000 metres.
The picture for waterbirds and seabirds is mixed. Waterbird numbers are largely healthy, with the 2006/2007 population numbers 85% above levels in the 1970s. But seabirds have seen a 9% decrease in numbers since 2005, with herring gull numbers down over 50% since 1969. Seabirds are suffering particularly badly in north and north-west Scotland, due to the arrival of invasive species such as rat and mink, which affect nesting sites.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
For centuries it was an arbiter of the British spring; people used to munch bunches of watercress in the street like ice-cream cones. After a winter of eating meat and root vegetables, it was believed to be just the thing to “clear the blood”. The Greeks swore by its health-giving properties, and the Romans thought it would help them excel in combat. But no one has embraced watercress like the British – since the Earl of Sandwich paired it with cold roast beef in the nation’s first-ever takeaway, we have been eating more of it than anyone else in the world. However, this peppery crop, so rich in iron, vitamins and minerals, should never be taken for granted. If it was not for a few white knights who stepped in to bail out the industry a decade or so ago, watercress would have vanished from the greengrocers’ shelves.
By the 1980s, the ready availability of lettuce, followed by a contamination scare, had all but killed the market, with 90 per cent of Britain’s watercress growers deserting their gravel beds. Fast forward a few decades, and thanks to a Page 3 Girl and the saucy tag-line: “Not just a bit on the side”, the fortunes of this tasty superfood have been reversed. Watercress has become a booming £60m industry, doubling in size over the past seven years, with supermarket sales 30 per cent up in the past year alone. “It has the heart and soul of the nation,” is how Tom Amery, one of a new generation of growers, rather lyrically puts it. “We were overtaken by rocket briefly, but then we turned around and beat it again. The British just love watercress.”
At London’s Le Bouchon Breton brasserie, head chef Vickram Singh Purewal has devised a dish for his spring menu of watercress risotto served with a soft-poached hen’s egg. “I cook a basic risotto, using |either chicken or vegetable stock, then, in the final minutes, add a ‘chlorophyll’ of watercress. I love its vibrant colour, both as a key ingredient and a garnish. It is just so versatile. During winter, I usually combine it with meat and game, but I also use it for a dessert of watercress soufflé served with a salt-caramel sauce.”
It seems that the salad-starved Brits of old instinctively sussed out the health benefits identified by Hippocrates as long ago as 400BC. That’s when the founder of modern medicine set up his first hospital on Kos beside a spring, in order to grow bountiful supplies of watercress to feed his patients.
The Greeks called it kardamon, and believed it could brighten their intellect, giving rise to the proverb: “Eat watercress and get wit.” Two thousand years before Popeye came on to the scene armed with a can of spinach, General Xenophon was making his soldiers eat their greens – specifically watercress – “for vigour” before going into battle.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
Good news for chocoholics: there is more high-quality stuff around, it does not come from areas that exploit child labour, it has genuine health benefits, and you can now find a decent stash on nearly every high street in Britain.
But the bad news is it's not so easy to tellproperly made chocolate from over-roasted rubbish. "Belgian", "organic", "Fairtrade" and even "70 per cent" are mere marketing buzzwords – and not one of those designations is a guarantee of good taste.
"It's all about how well the beans have been cared for," says Paul A Young, a top chocolatier whose book, Adventures With Chocolate, which attempts to define quality as well as the special characteristics of cocoa beans grown in different countries, has just been voted best chocolate cookbook in the world.
"Chocolate from Madagascar, Venezuela and Ecuador all tastes different and can all be delicious," he explains. "But if the beans have been poorly treated – over-roasting them is one common form of abuse – the result will be bad chocolate. It's like wine – the grapes and soil don't tell the full story. The quality of the product is down to the wine-maker, and in chocolate it's all about how the beans have been cultivated and processed."
As an avid educator as well as truffle-maker, Young stocks dozens of varieties in his London stores, priced at a not-inconsiderable £3.50 for a little 50g slab to around £8.95 for tiny rare artisanal blocks by cult manufacturers Amano, Tcho and Mast of Brooklyn.
Despite the price, he has dozens of addicts who come in "every single day for a little piece of something". It may well be its addictive qualities that are driving the high end of the chocolate market. The dark stuff with a high proportion of cocoa solids promotes the release of serotonin and dopamine, the so-called "love drug", as well as theobromine, which gives the kind of kick associated with an espresso.
Paul and his many rivals – "there has to be a chocolatier in nearly every town in Britain now" – may be at the top end of a rarefied market, but they are having a huge impact on the high street. "We have had people from M&S in looking at what we are doing," he says, and Liz Jarman, technical developer of confectionery products for Sainsbury's, confirms: "We get chocolatiers in to give workshops to our buyers and help them understand what's involved in producing a really good bar of chocolate. There's been a lot of press coverage around premium chocolate, and while with the recession we're not seeing a huge rise above the £2 price point, it's an area of growth we want to invest in. We're spending a lot of time on what cocoa should go into our products from the point of view of where it comes from. We currently offer a couple of bars of single origin – Santo Domingo and São Tomé, for example – which have quite distinct flavours, and are looking at adding more."
Expect to see guidance for connoisseurs coming to a shelf near you soon: "We have adventurous customers who started trial-purchasing different coffees when we explained their characteristics, and we might do that for chocolate," adds Jarman, who also finds space for emerging small brands like Chocolate Society. Interestingly, that company distributes the wildly expensive Valrhona, one of the finest sources of chocolate "couverture" (the blocks used by chefs and chocolatiers as their raw material), yet Jarman admits Sainsbury's, the first supermarket to make Valrhona available to British foodies, could not sustain the price for the French bars, which is double or treble the price of Menier and Green & Black's that dominate the home-baking shelves, along with their own brands.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
The Heart Attack Cafe, San Diego County Fair, California. Photograph: Simon Majumdar
I recently spent a day walking around the San Diego County Fair. Threading my way through the crowds, I came across a giant food trailer called The Heart Attack Cafe. As you see above, it was painted in lurid yellow and green and carried a picture of a nurse cheerily brandishing a defibrillator. It was lunchtime and the stall was attracting a decent amount of custom, so I joined the queue and stood for a moment to review the menu.
As I did, people squeezed past me carrying bathtub containers of soda-pop and trays laden with deep fried garlic, deep fried cheese, cinnamon chips and bacon wrapped in a thick coating of sweet chocolate. And everyone had some unassuming little deep fried doughy balls that, judging by the juices running down the ample chins of the people eating them, were bursting in their mouths to release a centre of pure, unadulterated butter.
This might not come as news to all of you but it was a bit of a shocker for me (I like the addition of cream cheese in this recipe just in case there wasn't quite enough full fat dairy produce in the original) and I've stared down some pretty challenging food in my time. On this occasion, I retired to the relative safety of the fair's main food area to decide between something meaty on a stick or a Gyro (Yee-ro), the American equivalent of a doner kebab and muse on how the Americans have taken the simple act of deep frying food and turned it into something of an art form.
Earlier in the year KFC launched the Double Down, which replaced the potentially healthy bread-like portion of a cheese and bacon sandwich with two slices of deep fried chicken breast. Down in Arizona, the Heart Attack Grill (there seems to be a pattern emerging here) offers "Flatliner Fries" which come coated in beef gravy or cheese. These accompany a "Quadruple Bypass Burger" containing four patties of meat and eight, count 'em, eight slices of cheese. People over 350lbs eat for free.
So far I've missed out on the four pattie experience, but I have encountered some interesting deep fried foods in the United States.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
Second seed Caroline Wozniacki overcame a slow start before powering past Flavia Pennetta to reach the quarter-finals of the Rogers Cup.
The Dane won 4-6, 6-3, 6-1 against Pennetta on Thursday and will next face another Italian, the French Open winner Francesca Schiavone, who enjoyed a 6-4, 6-3 victory over former world's No 1 Dinara Safina.
The major casualty of Thursday's play was the fourth-seeded Russian Elena Dementieva, who lost 7-6, 6-4 to China's Zheng Jie.
The weather turned cool for the evening session after a brief rain delay, but it did not stop Wozniacki from notching her fourth win in as many matches against Pennetta.
In the top half of the draw, Kim Clijsters breezed into the last eight with a 6-2, 6-1 win over Kaia Kanepi. Clijsters, who won the title in Cincinnati last week, was coming off a tougher second-round meeting with American Bethanie Mattek-Sands, which the Belgian won in three sets.
"I was playing an opponent who could not miss a shot, while today Kanepi was missing a lot, especially since her strengths are usually her serve and her backhand," Clijsters said. "I really felt that I had opportunities once I was in a rally, and she was either going to make a mistake or I could really try to make her move. Clijsters will face Vera Zvonareva in the last eight, after the eighth seed from Russia saw off Agnes Szavay of Hungary 6-3, 6-3.
Svetlana Kuznetsova had a 6-4, 1-6, 6-3 victory over Poland's Agnieszka Radwanska, turning around the match after getting thrashed in the second set. So what did she do during the break?
"I take a vodka shot, no?" Kuznetsova said with a laugh. "No, nothing like that. ... I just go to the locker room, change all my clothes, eat a banana and I go back. It's very simple. It was 6-1, but almost every game was deuce, so it was pretty hard. I took a break and it worked." The win put the 11th-seeded Kuznetsova into a quarter-final against Zheng yesterday.
In other matches, 10th-seeded Victoria Azarenka beat ninth-seeded Li Na of China 6-3, 6-3, and the 17th seed Marion Bartoli of France ousted the Czech qualifier Iveta Benesova 6-0, 6-1. Benesova was coming off a surprise win over top-seeded Jelena Jankovic. Azarenka and Bartoli were due to face off in the quarter-finals.
drive from www.independent.co.uk