■ Brazil
President piles on pressure
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has placed the highest expectations on the country's football team, the defending World Cup champions. In a video link late on Thursday from the capital Brasilia to the Brazilian training quarters in Germany, Lula told coach Carlos Parreira, team coordinator Mario Zagallo and team captain Cafu that the country's confidence about the World Cup was unanimous and unprecedented. "Nobody here accepts the possibility that Brazil won't be world champions," the leftwing head of state said. Lula asked if striker Ronaldo was too fat with the tournament about to begin. Parreira replied diplomatically, calling Ronaldo "very strong." "He's not the little boy he was back then [at the 1994 World Cup]," Parreira said.
■ Two Koreas
TV ad builds unity
North Koreans are cheering their South Korean neighbors scoring a goal in the World Cup -- at least in a new TV advert. Amid efforts to bring the divided Koreas together, a new South Korean commercial features the actual recording of a North Korean announcer. "Shoot! The header scores!" the announcer cries with a thick North Korean accent. "The South Korean team has scored a golden goal." The voiceover was taken from the South Korea-Italy match during the 2002 World Cup. The ad shows a fictional North Korean family cheering, but they are actually portrayed by ethnic Koreans living in Shanghai, China.
■ China
10 billion glued to TVs
State television service CCTV is expecting an audience of 10 billion for their World Cup coverage, even though most of the matches will take place in the middle of the night and the national team failed to qualify. "It's difficult to tell how many people in China will watch the World Cup," an official from CCTV sports centre told state news agency Xinhua. "But judging from my experience, the accumulative amount of audience will be more than 10 billion." World soccer's governing body FIFA reckon the last World Cup finals in Japan and South Korea attracted an aggregate global television audience of 28.8 billion. More than 250 million Chinese watched the 2002 final between Brazil and Germany and CCTV are offering blanket coverage and multiple replays of the 63 matches this time around. Another producer of CCTV said as the station would be broadcasting matches non-stop for 24 hours, an audience of 10 billion would "not be surprising at all."
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