White House hopeful Barack Obama fired back at Republican foe John McCain in a new row over Iraq, as his Europe and Middle East tour Friday took him to France, after a massive campaign event in Berlin. As rave reviews greeted his soaring speech on mending transatlantic ties before 200,000 people on Thursday, the Democratic White House nominee was due in Paris for talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

US actor Danny Glover, who plans an epic next year on Haitian independence hero Toussaint-Louverture, said he slaved to raise funds for the movie because financiers complained there were no white heroes. "Producers said 'It's a nice project, a great project... where are the white heroes?'" he told AFP during a stay in Paris this month for a seminar on film.

Cadel Evans has been tipped to overhaul his 1min 34sec deficit to Spanish rival Carlos Sastre ahead of their duel for the Tour de France yellow jersey in the final time trial on Saturday. Sastre, who rides for the CSC team run by former Tour winner Bjarne Riis, stole the limelight on the final day in the Alps Wednesday by taking the lead thanks to a victorious attack at the bottom of the 13.8 km climb to the Alpe d'Huez.

A Qantas Boeing 747 flying to Melbourne made an emergency landing in Manila on Friday after a dramatic mid-air rupture that left a "gaping hole" in its fuselage, officials and passengers said. Stunned passengers reported how the jumbo, which had taken off from London and stopped in Hong Kong, plunged 20,000 feet (6,000) metres in what one said was an "absolutely terrifying" ordeal.

Internet security researchers on Thursday warned that hackers have caught on to a "critical" flaw that lets them control traffic on the Internet. An elite squad of computer industry engineers that labored in secret to solve the problem released a software "patch" two weeks ago and sought to keep details of the vulnerability hidden at least a month to give people time to protect computers from attacks.