Todays sporting headlines:

SPRINTER Justin Gatlin agreed to an eight-year ban from athletics today for testing positive to drugs. He also forfeits the world 100m record he shares.

LIVERPOOL progressed to the group stage of the Champions League with a 3-2 aggregate victory over Maccabi Haifa in Kiev today.

DARRELL Hair, the umpire who rocked the cricket world, last night defiantly stood by his actions and said he would fight any move to shunt him into retirement.

IN A coup for Victoria, the MCG will today be confirmed as the venue for next year's Bledisloe Cup rugby union Test match between Australia and New Zealand

BILLY Slater says he hasn't felt part of Melbourne Storm's record-breaking season and he is desperate to leave his indelible mark before it's too late.

TRIPLE Olympic champion Marion Jones said yesterday she was shocked her drugs test from a urine sample taken in June was positive.

THE new-look Boomers have fallen just short of a huge upset at the world championships, losing 72-69 to medal favourite and European champion Greece.

Hi, I'm just testing a new application called Writely. It's a free Google word processor and I believe it will allow me to post directly to my blog. Not sure what it's going to look like, but I'll give it a go. Typing directly into blogger is a pain and opening Word all the time is also a pain, it just doesn't work all that well. Anyone interested in checking out writely should go to www.writely.com, funnily enough, Microsoft has launched Live Writer which I've download but not yet installed. It's supposed to be a purpose built blogger tool and might be better but as I'm using blogger, I think Writely will do a better job.

I wonder if I can import you tube into this....