Scarred by years of failure on the international stage, the English are following a path taken by some of their biggest rivals in a bid to regain their heavyweight status in football.

Prince William and his wife, Kate, will officially open England's state-of-the-art national football center on Tuesday, a 100 million pound ($160 million) facility that it's hoped will revive the flagging fortunes of football's founder.

A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb near a compound of the Syrian intelligence on the outskirts of Damascus on Monday, a Syrian official said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in the blast in Harasta, a suburb of the nation's capital, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

A Finnish couple has added to their victories by taking first place in the North American Wife Carrying Championship at Maine's Sunday River ski resort.

Taisto Miettinen and Kristina Haapanen traveled from Helsinki, Finland — where they won the World Wife Carrying Championship — for Saturday's contest. The Sun Journal reports that the couple finished with a time of 52.58 seconds on a course that includes hurdles, sand traps and a water hole.

Audra McDonald and Will Swenson have tied the knot, cementing a relationship between two of Broadway's best looking and talented stars.

According to a publicist for the bride, the couple married Saturday at their home in Croton-on-Hudson in New York. The bride's wedding dress was designed by Esosa.

Beijing authorities have completed a network of monitors that will more accurately measure air quality in the smog-ridden city after being pushed into it by public pressure and pollution reports from the U.S. embassy.

The Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center said Saturday that another 15 monitoring stations had begun releasing real-time data on small particulates known as PM2.5. The tiny pollution particles that may result from the burning of fuels in vehicles and power plants can penetrate deep into the lungs, so measuring them is considered a more accurate reflection of air quality than other methods.

American companies should avoid doing business with China's two leading technology firms because they pose a national security threat to the United States, the House Intelligence Committee is warning in a report to be issued Monday.

The panel says U.S. regulators should block mergers and acquisitions in this country by Huawei Technologies Ltd. and ZTE Corp, among the world's leading suppliers of telecommunications gear and mobile phones.

EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso says a blueprint for a banking union and supervision of the banking system will be presented at the EU's October summit as part of measures to raise confidence in the euro currency.

Barroso spoke with reporters Saturday after meeting with Malta Prime Minster Lawrence Gonzi following a gathering of five southern European countries with five North African nations.

A senior European Central Bank official is insisting that the bank can't help Greece by agreeing to roll over the government bonds it holds or accept lower interest rates.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, who wants more time to enact reforms and budget cuts, has suggested the ECB could help that way.

Authorities say a single batch of deep-frozen strawberries appears to have been behind an outbreak of gastroenteritis in eastern Germany that hit more than 11,000 people, mostly children at schools and day-care centers.

The national disease-control center, the Robert Koch Institute, said late Friday that studies showed a strong connection between eating food prepared with the strawberries and the cases of vomiting and diarrhea.

Google and major book publishers have settled a lengthy legal battle over digital copyrights, but a bigger dispute still looms with thousands of authors who allege that Google is illegally profiting from their works.

The truce announced Thursday ends a federal lawsuit filed in 2005 by several members of the Association of American Publishers after Google Inc. began stockpiling its Internet search index with digital duplicates of books scanned from libraries.