Melbourne, Apr. 11 : Olympic champion Cathy Freeman married Melbourne stockbroker James Murch in a private ceremony on Victoria''s Bellarine Peninsula on Saturday.

Under a sea of umbrellas put up to foil the long lenses of paparazzi photographers and TV cameras, the champion sprinter walked down the aisle to wed Murch in front of 120 guests at the Spray Farm winery at Portarlington.

The couple is believed to have signed an exclusive agreement with a magazine for 100,000 dollars, but the fee will be donated to charity, the Nine Network reported on Saturday.

Canberra (Australia), Apr. 11 : Defence strategists have ignored the advice of Australia''s most senior intelligence chiefs and rejected the view that China''s military expansion poses little threat to the nation''s long-term security.

The standoff between the intelligence doves and defence hawks has gone all the way to Kevin Rudd personally, reports The Australian.

But the hawks have won, and Australia will spend over 100 billion dollars over the next two decades to boost its naval and air war-fighting capacity.

Canberra (Australia), Apr. 11: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd knows that hallway cricket is banned in the outer corridors of Parliament House, but this does not stop him from rolling a cricket ball over inside his office.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Rudd uses sport as a means of communicating with staff. After travelling and working most of the day, at 6.40 p. m., he starts walking around with a battered Sherrin football and a makeshift cricket ball.

Melbourne, Apr 11: Australia’s cricket coach Tim Nielsen has said that fast bowler Brett Lee won’t be rushed back into one-day cricket too quickly during the Pakistan series starting in Dubai on April 22.

Lee, who broke down in December in the Melbourne Test against South Africa with foot and ankle injuries, is in Port Elizabeth training with his Indian Premier League side Kings XI Punjab ahead of the IPL’s five-week season, which starts in Cape Town on April 18.

London, Apr 11: Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who has been convicted of imprisoning his daughter for 24 years in a windowless cellar and fathering her seven children, is begging his family through phone calls to visit him in jail, it has emerged.

The calls, however, usually end with kids hanging up on him, prison officials said.

The 74-year-old has not been able to contact his daughter Elisabeth, 42, or the six children he fathered with her during her ordeal, reports The Sun.

Sydney, Apr. 10 : The head of Australia's Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell said today that most AIDS-afflicted countries were ''awash with condoms''.

Cardinal Pell said he agreed with Pope Benedict XVI that condoms were aggravating the African AIDS epidemic by encouraging promiscuity.

"The idea that you can solve a great spiritual and health crisis like AIDS with a few mechanical contraptions like condoms is ridiculous," Cardinal Pell said.