Ex-Munster hooker Denis Fogarty has been named in the French Pro D2 team of the season after an excellent first year with Aurillac.

Munster are a team who have often faced — and overcome — huge hurdles in the Heineken Cup. Tomorrow, in the south of France, they face another of those seemingly impossible challenges.

Fifty games.

As you would expect from a player just named in his division’s team of the month, life is pretty sweet right now for former Munster hooker Denis Fogarty.

With Brad Thorn recently arrived, Leo Cullen fully recovered from surgery and Devin Toner likely to be named as first reserve, it is unlikely Damian Browne will get to register his ninth Heineken Cup appearance this weekend.

AFTER the drama of Friday night when Gloucester and Connacht turned form and expectations on its head by beating Toulouse and Harlequins in Pool 6, you sensed it was going to be one of those dramatic Heineken Cup weekends.

CLERMONT Auvergne coach Vern Cotter has urged his side to lift their game another notch in anticipation of an improved Leinster performance for Saturday’s Heineken Cup showdown at the Aviva Stadium.

A French man who hacked into the twitter accounts of Britney Spears, Lily Allen and Barack Obama has been arrested.

FOR the second successive year, Munster have departed France’s Auvergne region with a bonus point they deserved, if only for the sheer grit and determination they displayed when under the fiercest pressure for much of the second half.

SYLVAIN CHAVANEL bade farewell to Cofidis by delivering a second Tour de France stage win for the French team in the 163-kilometre flat stage from Roanne to Montlucon yesterday.

Detectives investigating the murder of two French students have arrested a sixth person, police said today.

THE Munster rugby battlecry of Stand Up and Fight will ring out with renewed vigour in central France this weekend as the province faces a vital Heineken European Cup clash against ASM Clermont Auvergne.

IRISH coach Mark McDermott yesterday announced his squad for next month’s IRB U21 World Cup in Auvergne, France.

Coach Mark McDermott will lead his Ireland U21 squad into battle at the World Cup in France next month.

Rose Martin is impressed by Bramble Lodge, a massive property with plenty of stylish rooms.

Mark McDermott's Ireland outfit have been draw to play hosts France, Argentina and Georgia in the pool stages of the 2006 Under-21 Rugby World Cup.

France’s opposition is celebrating today after crushing the conservative government of President Jacques Chirac in local elections and setting the stage for a cabinet shake-up.

French voters today delivered a stinging defeat to President Jacques Chirac’s government and its programme of painful economic reforms in regional elections that turned into a national vote of censure, exit polls showed.

Three-times Dakar Rally winner Richard Sainct has his sights set on another victory when the world’s most famous motorcycle race reaches the capital of Senegal on January 18.