TURNBERRY, Scotland — Tom Watson has teed off in the third round of the British Open, trying to keep up his quest to become the oldest major champion in golf history.

The 59-year-old Watson played in the final group at Turnberry with fellow American Steve Marino. The two were tied for the 36-hole lead at 5-under 135.

Going with a 5-iron, Watson knocked his first shot Saturday right down the middle of the fairway and set off to chants of “Good luck, Tom!”

Watson already is the oldest player to lead a round at a major. Now, he has his sights set on winning the claret jug for the sixth time. At least he doesn’t have to worry about Tiger Woods, who failed to make a major cut for only the second time in his professional career.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

TURNBERRY, Scotland (AP) — Tom Watson danced what he called “a Scottish jig” on the 18th green after another long putt fell into the cup. Play on.

About an hour later, Tiger Woods tapped in for a par that didn’t mean a thing. Time to call it a day.

Talk about role reversal.

Watson, the 59-year-old former British Open champion, was supposed to be going through the motions, taking his penultimate curtain call at a tournament that holds such a special place in his career. Instead, he heads to the weekend with a share of the lead, having put together two magical rounds and needing two more to get his hands on the claret jug for a record-tying sixth time.

Woods, the world’s best player and right in his prime, was supposed to be homing in on a 15th major championship, another step closer to Jack Nicklaus’ record 18. Instead, Woods missed the cut, hopped his private jet to Florida, and gave his personal chef a few unexpected days off.

These were two Turnberry shockers.

“It’s as if the spirits are on my side,” said Watson, who made history Friday afternoon as the oldest player to lead a major championship, tying Open rookie Steve Marino with a 5-under 135.

Woods must have felt like everything was stacked against him, because he’s sure not used to failing. This was only the second time in 49 major championships as a pro that he failed to make it to the weekend.

“Kept making mistake after mistake,” Woods said.

Now comes a weekend alive with possibilities, just none of them involving Woods.

The third round started in pleasant, partly cloudy weather, though that persistent breeze along the Scottish coast toughened things up. Just ask two-time champion Padraig Harrington, whose hopes of winning a third straight Open faded away when a 6-over 76 left him at 9-over 219. But American Bryce Moulder showed a low number was possible, posting an early 67.

Watson will take aim at Harry Vardon and his six British Open titles. One shot behind was 49-year-old Mark Calcavecchia, who won the Open 20 years ago up the coast at Royal Troon. He, too, survived the stretch of holes along the Firth of Clyde in a stiff wind that demanded so much of every shot. Calcavecchia made a 40-foot birdie putt on the 10th that carried him to a 69.

Two-time U.S. Open champion Retief Goosen twice saved par from 35 feet and had a 70, putting him in the group at 137 that included three-time major champion Vijay Singh. Thirteen players were within three shots of the lead, while Sergio Garcia (139) and John Daly (140) were both in striking distance.

“I guess the memories are with me, all the wonderful memories I’ve had playing links golf,” Watson said. “Walking down the fairways, walking up onto the greens, people showing their respect for me, showing my respect for them. And it’s been since 1975 — 34 years I’ve played links golf. And it’s a fabric of my life, I can tell you that.”

Woods failed to make the cut for only the sixth time in his career, and the first since the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, his first tournament after his father died.

“Everybody’s entitled to a bad day,” said Lee Westwood, who played with Woods and shot 70 to join the group at 138. “It was tough conditions out there, and the wind can play havoc with your swing sometimes. And he hit a couple of poor shots at the wrong time.”

Watson finished with a pair of birdie putts that were nearly as long as his odds of winning another claret jug. There was a 75-footer footer from the back on the 16th green, then a 45-footer at No. 18 to cap an even-par 70 that might have been more impressive than his bogey-free 65 on Thursday. This time, he had to bounce back after making five bogeys in six holes, four of them in a row.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I could win,” Watson said.

Woods always thinks he can win, but his performance on the back nine was abysmal.

He hit one tee shot that was never found in the high grass along the dunes right of the 10th fairway. He hit into a fairway bunker for the first time all week. It took him two shots to get up a bank and onto the green at the 13th.

Woods dropped seven shots during a wretched six-hole stretch, and not even two late birdies could spare him the indignation of missing the cut. Needing to chip in for birdie on the 18th hole, he came up a few feet short and tapped in for a 74 and 145 total, one shot off the cut.

“I kept compounding my problems out there,” Woods said.

Watson was tied for the lead with Marino, a 29-year-old American who didn’t know until last weekend that he had gotten into the British Open as an alternate, and then had to fly his father from Virginia to his home in Florida to fetch Marino’s passport.

“I wasn’t even expecting to play in this tournament,” Marino said.

One year after Greg Norman made a stunning bid to win the British Open at 53, the prospects of Watson winning at 59 are staggering. The oldest major champion was Julius Boros, who was 48 when he captured the 1968 PGA Championship.

Watson won his first of his five British Opens at Carnoustie in 1975, five months before Woods was born.

Now Watson is trying to win another — and he doesn’t have to worry about Woods getting in the way.

Work by Sir Joshua Reynolds was among those uploaded to Wikipedia

The battle over Wikipedia’s use of images from a British art gallery’s website has intensified.

The online encyclopaedia has accused the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) of betraying its public service mission.

But the gallery has said it needs to recoup the £1m cost of its digitisation programme and claims Wikipedia has misrepresented its position.

The NPG is threatening legal action after 3,300 images from its website were uploaded to Wikipedia.

The high-resolution images were uploaded by Wikipedia volunteer Derrick Coetzee.

Now Erik Moeller, the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation which runs the online encyclopaedia, has laid out the organisation’s stance in a blog post.

‘Empire building’

He said most observers would think the two sides should be “allies not adversaries” and that museums and other cultural institutions should not pursue extra revenue at the expense of limiting public access to their material.

“It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopaedia serves any public interest whatsoever,” he wrote.

He points out that two German photographic archives donated 350,000 copyrighted images for use on Wikipedia, and other institutions in the United States and the UK have seen benefits in making material available for use.

Another Wikipedia volunteer David Gerard has blogged about the row, claiming that the National Portrait Gallery makes only £10-15,000 a year from web licensing, less than it makes “selling food in the cafe”.

They honestly think the paintings belong to them rather than to us David Gerard Wikipedia volunteer

But the gallery insists that its case has been misrepresented, and has now released a statement denying many of the charges made by Wikipedia.

It denies claims that it has been “locking up and limiting access to educational materials”, saying that it has been a pioneer in making its material available.

It has worked for the last five years toward the target of getting half of its collection online by 2009. “We will be able to achieve this,” said the gallery’s statement, “as a result of self-generated income.”

The gallery says that while it only makes a limited revenue from web licensing, it earns far more from the reproduction of its images in books and magazines - £339,000 in the last year.

But it says the present situation jeopardises its ability to fund its digitisation process from its own resources.

Legal issues

The gallery has claimed that Derrick Coetzee’s actions have breached English copyright laws, which protect copies of original works even when they themselves are out of copyright.

The National Portrait Gallery now says it only sent a legal letter to Derrick Coetzee after the Wikimedia Foundation failed to respond to requests to discuss the issue. But it says contact has now been made and remains hopeful that a dialogue will be possible.

A spokeswoman also said that the two German archives mentioned in Erik Moeller’s blog had in fact supplied medium resolution images to Wikipedia, and insisted that the National Portrait Gallery had been willing to offer similar material to Wikipedia.

The gallery said the row could prevent it putting more of its collection online

The gallery also explained how Derrick Coetzee was able to obtain the high resolution files from its site. They were made available to visitors using a “Zoomify” feature, which works by allowing several high resolution files to be seen all together.

It claims Mr Coetzee used special software to “de-scramble” the high-resolution tiles, allowing the whole portrait to be seen in high resolution.

The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has backed the National Portrait Gallery’s stance.

“If owners of out of copyright material are not going to have the derivative works they have created protected, which will result in anyone being able to use then for free, they will cease to invest in the digitisation of works, and everyone will be the poorer,” it wrote in an email to its members.

But the Wikipedia volunteer David Gerard accuses the gallery of bureaucratic empire building.

“They honestly think the paintings belong to them rather than to us,” he wrote.

The lake’s construction is one of the world’s largest building projects

Turkmenistan has launched the latest stage of a plan to channel water across thousands of kilometres of desert to create a vast inland sea.

The lake will be filled with drainage water from the country’s cotton fields.

President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov said the “Golden Age Lake” plan showed his country was preserving nature and improving the environment.

But critics say the water will be full of fertiliser and insecticides, and will evaporate quickly.

The project is one of the biggest and most ambitious in the world, and could cost up to $20bn (£12bn).

President Berdymukhamedov, wielding a spade, opened up the first tributary to bring water to a natural depression in the Karakum Desert. The desert covers more than 80% of Turkmenistan.

He told the crowd that the lake would make the desert bloom.

The president has approved other huge construction projects in Ashkhabad

“Our initiatives to provide water and environmental security… demonstrate that Turkmenistan is making huge efforts to contribute to common work on preserving the nature and improving the environment,” he said.

The water from the canals, he said, would attract wildlife and open up new land for agriculture.

Village elders in traditional clothing helped the water flow into the new channel.

After the opening ceremony, Mr Berdymukhamedov mounted a bejewelled horse to ride back to the helicopter which brought him in from the capital, Ashkhabad.

‘Dead sea’ fears

The Turkmen government, on its website, said the project “would go down in history of the epoch of New Revival as one of its brightest pages”.

Work on the project began in 2000, with the construction of two canals which bisect the country.

Thousands of smaller feeder channels will funnel the water from Turkmenistan’s irrigated cotton fields to the new lake. Treatment plants are planned to clean the water.

It could take many years to fill the lake - in the Karashor depression - but it will eventually cover 2,000 sq km (770 sq miles).

Environmentalists say a lot of the water will simply disappear into the desert’s permeable soil. Large amounts, they say, will also evaporate in the high temperatures, leaving the soil extremely salty.

They predict that the Golden Age Lake will simply become a new “Dead Sea”.

Analysts also fear that Turkmenistan might be tempted to help fill the new lake with fresh water from the Amu Darya, a river on the Uzbek border, which Uzbekistan relies on for irrigation. This, they say, could start a war.

Water is a precious resource in Central Asia. Drought and overuse have caused ecological disasters like that of the Aral Sea to the north, which has shrunk by 90% in recent decades.

Under the rule of former President Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan was renowned for its huge, Soviet-style construction projects. Mr Niyazov, who died in 2006, initiated the Golden Age Lake project.

Mr Berdymukhamedov came to power vowing to break with the past. But he has already approved $1bn projects for Ashkhabad, including a new five-star hotel, government buildings, a new stadium and a “Palace of Happiness” for weddings.

The contents of the containers were clearly of UK origin

Brazilian authorities are demanding that more than 1,400 tonnes of hazardous British waste found in three ports be returned to the UK.

The Brazilian environment agency, Ibama, says that international treaties have been violated.

An investigation into how and why the waste was sent to Brazil has been launched by the British government.

It has emerged that two companies named by Brazil as suspected exporters of the waste are owned by a Brazilian.

The waste, which included syringes, condoms, nappies and bags of blood, was found in about 90 shipping containers on three Brazilian docks in recent months.

The latest 25 containers found in a port near Sao Paulo were put on show for journalists on Friday.

‘Not a rubbish dump’

The BBC’s Gary Duffy said that inside them was everything from leftover food to cleaning products, creating a foul-smelling mess.

Among the rubbish were the names of many British supermarkets, and UK newspapers were also clearly identifiable.

Ibama officials say they want the waste sent back to the UK.

“We will ask for the repatriation of this garbage,” said Roberto Messias, Ibama president.

“Clearly, Brazil is not a big rubbish dump of the world.”

Reports in the UK media say the waste was sent from Felixstowe in eastern England to the port of Santos, near Sao Paulo, and two other ports in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul.

The Brazilian companies that received the waste said they had been expecting recyclable plastic, The Times reported.

Ibama has named two British companies it suspects as being involved in the shipments.

The Brazilian director of those companies, who is based in England, told BBC Brazil that anything in the containers that was not plastic for recycling was the responsibility of his suppliers.

The British Embassy in Brazil said in a statement that it was investigating and would “not hesitate to act” if it was found that a UK company had violated the Basel Convention on the movement of hazardous waste.

Both the UK and Brazil are signatories of the treaty, which came into force in 1992.

UK Environment Secretary Hilary Benn told The Times he had ordered an investigation.

“If, having looked into this particular case, there are lessons that need to be learnt about enforcement, then we will do that,” he said.

Mischa Barton has starred in a string of films including The Sixth Sense

Actress Mischa Barton, best known for starring in the hit drama The OC, has been admitted to hospital in the US.

Los Angeles police said they removed the 23-year-old from her home on Wednesday afternoon for an undisclosed medical problem.

In a statement her publicist Craig Schneider said Barton had been “safely transferred” to hospital where she will remain under doctor’s orders.

Barton’s new film Homecoming opened in the US on Friday.

She rose to fame as Marissa Cooper in The OC, which was based around a group of wealthy teenagers living in California.

The London-born actress has also appeared in several movies, including The Sixth Sense and St Trinian’s.

In December 2007 she was arrested and later pleaded no contest to a drunken driving charge.

Prosecutors have opened a manslaughter investigation after a stage being built for a Madonna concert collapsed killing two people, a French official has said.

Eight other people were seriously injured in Thursday’s accident at the Velodrome stadium in Marseille.

Assistant prosecutor Marc Cimamonti said an investigation for manslaughter and involuntary injuries in a work-related accident has been opened.

Madonna has said she is “devastated” by the news of the deaths.

‘Tragic news’

Her concert, planned for Sunday, has been cancelled.

Charles Criscenzo, a 53-year-old French worker, was killed outright in the accident and Charles Prow, a 23-year-old from Headingley in Leeds, died in hospital.

Technicians had been setting up the stage at the city’s Velodrome stadium when the partially-built roof fell in on Thursday, bringing down a crane.

The 60,000-seater Velodrome is France’s second-biggest sports arena and home to the Olympique de Marseille football club.

The planned concert was part of Madonna’s Sticky and Sweet tour

About 50 people from a range of nationalities were working to set up the structure, city sports official Richard Miron said.

The roof “started shaking and collapsing” gradually, said Marseille city councillor Maurice Di Nocera.

“Since it did not collapse right away that allowed several people to get out,” he said.

Madonna, who is performing on her Sticky and Sweet tour, was in Udine, Italy, when told of the incident.

“I am devastated to have just received this tragic news,” she said in a statement released by Live Nation, the organisers of the concert.

“My prayers go out to those who were injured and their families, along with my deepest sympathy to all those affected by this heartbreaking news.”

Madonna paid tribute to the technicians at her concert in Italy on Thursday.

“I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge and pay tribute to two people who lost their lives today,” she told fans at the Fruili Stadium in Udine.

“It’s a great tragedy to me,” she continued, choking back tears. “I feel so devastated to be in any way associated with anyone’s suffering.

“Let’s all just take a moment to say a prayer for Charles Criscenzo and Charlie Prow. Our hearts go out to their family and loved ones.”

GE boss Jeff Immelt says the firm is delivering “solid” results

General Electric’s earnings fell 47% to $2.9bn (£1.7bn) in the second quarter of 2009 from the same period last year, as the slowdown took its toll.

Revenues fell 17% to $39.1bn from the same quarter last year.

The company has been hit by falling revenues and profits at Capital Finance, its finance arm.

The conglomerate, seen as a barometer of US economic health, has interests ranging from the media to finance to heavy industry.

A 13% growth in profit at its energy infrastructure division was offset by an 80% drop at Capital Finance and a 41% fall at NBC Universal, the statement said.

“In a global economic environment that continues to remain challenging, GE delivered solid second-quarter business results,” said Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and chief executive.

“We are executing through the recession by aggressively controlling costs and driving working capital improvements while continuing to invest for future growth.”

Sales of Mattel’s key Barbie dolls were down 15%

Cost cutting helped toymaker Mattel achieve an 80% jump in profits in the April to June quarter, despite a drop in sales and a strong US dollar.

Net profit was $21.5m (£13.3m), up from $11.8m a year earlier. Revenue fell by 19% to $898.2m, down from $1.1bn.

The results at the company, best known for its Barbie doll, were much better than analysts had expected.

The results come at the end of a week in which a number of major US companies reported strong quarterly results.

“If the company can grow earnings on a sales decline by cost-cutting, then what can they do when sales actually stop falling?” said Chris White at Wedbush Securities.

Mattel boss Robert Eckert said the decline in sales was caused by slowing demand during the economic downturn and the fact that fewer toys were geared towards summer film releases.

He also said the strong US dollar affected international sales.

Sales of Barbie dolls fell by 15%, while those of Hot Wheels, another of the company’s best-known and most popular toys, fell by 10%.

Despite the rise in profits, Mattel said trading conditions in the second half of the year would remain challenging.

There are signs confidence may be returning to the building sector

The construction of new homes in the US rose 3.6% between May and June to the highest level in seven months, official figures have shown.

This is the second month in a row that housing starts have risen following a post-war low in April.

Compared with the same month a year ago, however, June starts were down 46%, the Commerce Department said.

The number of single family homes being built jumped 14.4% in June, the biggest jump in over four years.

‘Genuine surprise’

The number of new homes built totalled 582,000, many more than analysts had expected.

Figures for May were also revised upwards, from 532,000 to 562,000.

It is too soon to call a bottom to the housing market in the US The Centre for Economics and Business Research

“These figures look like a genuine upward surprise, and support our view that housing construction activity is bottoming out,” said Dean Maki at Barclays Capital.

For the April to June months, Mr Maki added that single family starts saw the biggest quarterly increase since the early 1990s.

The number of permits to break ground - considered an indicator of confidence in the building sector - climbed to its highest level since December last year.

Completions down

Some analysts, however, urged caution in the wake of the stronger-than-expected data.

“It is too soon to call a bottom to the housing market in the US,” said the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

William O’Donnell, head treasury strategist at RBS Securities, argued that: “This is another piece of data for those seeing the recession ending soon.”

“But housing starts are still within the range of the past six months and the completion rate is still down,” he said.

Somalia’s Islamists are accused of links to al-Qaeda

Two French security advisers seized in Somalia will be tried under Sharia law, an official from their captors, the Islamic al-Shabab militia, says.

The unnamed spokesman said they would be tried for spying and “conspiracy against Islam”.

The two, who were training government troops, were kidnapped by gunmen in a Mogadishu hotel on Tuesday and later handed over to al-Shabab insurgents.

Al-Shabab and its allies control much of southern Somalia.

The al-Shabab official said no date had been set for the trial of the two men.

Meeting al-Shabab Somali justice, Islamist-style

They were on an official mission to train the forces of the interim government, which has recently appealed for foreign help to tackle Islamist insurgents.

Moderate Islamist President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed was sworn in in January after UN-brokered peace talks.

He promised to introduce Sharia law but the hardliners accuse him of being a western stooge.

Somalia has not had a functioning national government since 1991.