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.

Amsterdam - Dutch legislator Geert Wilders is due to travel to Britain on Thursday despite an entry ban from the British authorities, Dutch media reported.

The leader of the liberal-rightist Freedom Party PVV, which is highly critical of Islam and migrants, was invited to London by a member of the House of Lords for a showing of his controversial political film Fitna.

The British authorities recently decided to refuse Wilders entry because the legislator would allegedly pose a threat to public security.

Repeated requests by the Dutch government to Britain to reconsider the entry ban did not have any effect.

It remains unclear whether Wilders will be allowed to board the British airplane at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.