Rotterdam, Netherlands  - Andy Murray dominated Mario Ancic in just over an hour, picking apart the Croatian's game 6-1, 6-2 on Saturday for a place in the final of the ABN-AMRO World Tennis.

The Scot second seed has come good at this edition at the Ahoy centre after losing in the first round on his debut a year ago.

The 21-year-old ranked fourth in the world is in line for a possible second title in as many months this season as he waits for the semi-final between top seed Rafael Nadal and Frenchman Gael Monfils.

Rotterdam, Netherlands  - Top seed Rafael Nadal reached his first semi-final at the ABN-AMRO World Tennis on Friday as Jo- Wilfried Tsonga set up match point with a double fault after serving 26 aces.

Nadal, who has gone the distance in all three of his matches, earned a 6-4, 6-7 (5-7), 6-4 victory, taking just under three hours.

"This was definitely my best match of the week," said the Spaniard, who came here after his Australian Open title with just three days off. "Tsonga was extremely tough. This was a very important win for me."

Rotterdam, Netherlands - Andy Murray takes a 1-3 record into his Saturday semi-final with Mario Ancic at the Rotterdam Open after advancing when French opponent Marc Giquel was unable to continue because of injury.

The second-seeded Scot advanced 7-6 (7-2), 4-6, 3-0 when Giquel had to retire with a left thigh problem.

Ancic and Murray will meet in a repeat of the Marseille final exactly a year ago in which the Briton scored his only victory in the series with his Croatian rival before losing two more times in 2008.

Rotterdam, Netherlands - Andy Murray takes a 1-3 record into his Saturday semi-final with Mario Ancic at the Rotterdam Open after advancing when French opponent Marc Giquel was unable to continue because of injury.

The second-seeded Scot advanced 7-6 (7-2), 4-6, 3-0 when Giquel had to retire with a left thigh problem.

Ancic and Murray will meet in a repeat of the Marseille final exactly a year ago in which the Briton scored his only victory in the series with his Croatian rival before losing two more times in 2008.

London, Feb 13 : The first complete draft of the Neanderthal genome has revealed no evidence that this ancient species ever interbred with modern humans.

According to a report by BBC News, a total of three billion "letters", covering 60 percent of the Neanderthal genome, have been sequenced by scientists from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and 454 Life Sciences Corporation, in Branford, Connecticut.

Neanderthals lived in Europe and parts of Asia until they became extinct about 30,000 years ago.

Amsterdam - The Dutch economy has formally slid into a recession, with fourth-quarter 2008 figures published Friday showing a 0.9 per cent drop from the preceding quarter.

The Central Bureau of Statistics figures were the second straight quarter in which the Dutch economy shrank, thereby fulfilling the formal definition of a recession.

The fourth quarter statistics also point to the biggest quarter- to-quarter decline of the Dutch economy since the early 1980s.

On an annual basis, the fourth-quarter 2008 economy was down 0.6 per cent from the final quarter of 2007, the first year-to-year quarterly drop in five years for the Dutch economy.