Hamburg - Bayer Leverkusen threw away a 3-0 lead in a 3-3 draw at SC Karlsruhe on Saturday as they failed to go top again in the Bundesliga standings.

Patrick Helmes, Stefan Kiessling and Michal Kadlec were on target in the opening 24 minutes for Leverkusen who appeared on course for a fifth straight victory.

But Karlsruhe rallied from Anthony da Silva, Tim Sebastian and Alexander Iashvili to earn a point after losing the previous five matches.

Vienna - International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge has said that the number of doping cases at the Beijing Olympics could still increase by seven.

In an exclusive interview with the Austrian news agency APA late Friday the Belgian said that the number of positive doping cases from the Beijing Olympics could practically double.

"There were 39 cases before the Olympics, while there were eight cases during the Olympics and seven cases are still in the pipeline, so there could be 15 cases in total.

Hamburg - Bayer Leverkusen threw away a 3-0 lead in a 3-3 draw at SC Karlsruhe on Saturday and failed to go top again in the Bundesliga standings.

Patrick Helmes, Stefan Kiessling and Michael Kadlec were on target in the opening 24 minutes for Leverkusen, but Karlsruhe rallied from Anthony da Silva, Tim Sebastian and Alexander Iashvili.

Hamburg - Carmakers struggling to fund lease purchase sales may turn to a German government fund originally devised to bail out banks, according to a news report Saturday.

The financial services divisions of most automakers hold banking licences in Germany and could qualify for guarantees. Interest rates on those guarantees average about 
2 per cent annually, which is significantly cheaper than commercial borrowing rates in the current credit crunch.

Taipei - A Taiwan man, infertile due to cancer, has become the father of twins after the sperm he had frozen 13 years ago, was used to impregnate his wife, a newspaper reported Saturday.

Doctors at the Taipei Medical University's College of Medicine set the local record for the use of the longest-preserved sperm in helping the couple have children, the China Times reported.

The man, identified only as Chen, was 23 and a university student in 1995 when he contracted testicular cancer. Fearing chemotherapy would make him infertile, he stored nine tubes of sperm in a sperm bank.

Baghdad - Nine Iraqi civilians were killed and dozens injured on Saturday as violent attacks continue in Iraq.

In a twin blast in al-Ramadi city, eight people were killed and 22 injured.

The attacks took place as two suicide bombers blew themselves up near a police station in the capital of al-Anbar province, about 110 kilometres west of Baghdad, the Iraqi al-Buratha news agency reported.

Earlier, one person was killed and seven injured in a bomb blast in northern Baghdad, police said.