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/ 13 February 2004
A Middle East-based British businessman has emerged as a key suspect in a secret network supplying Libya, Iran and North Korea with equipment to build nuclear bombs. Speaking for the first time this week, Paul Griffin denied that his company played any part in shipping prohibited material from the Far East.
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/ 15 December 2003
Singapore has enacted draconian legislation allowing the government to give unspecified authorities power to take unlimited pre-emptive action against suspected cyber-terrorists and computer hackers. Activists say the Singapore government is using terror as an excuse to erode civil rights.
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/ 24 October 2003
United States President George W Bush this week sought, on a flying visit to Indonesia, to mend fences with the Islamic world but faced harsh criticism of his Iraq and Middle East policies when he met three of the country’s moderate Muslim leaders.
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/ 13 October 2003
Ten South-East Asia nations last week signed a landmark accord to turn their vastly disparate states into an integrated, tariff-free trading and economic community by 2020. A pact with Beijing would create by far the world’s largest free-trade zone, with nearly two billion people and total GDP of almost -trillion.
The Myanmar junta has released 91 members of Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy party, in an apparent bid to deflect international pressure over her continued detention.
Japan and the United Kingdom this week intensified the global diplomatic pressure on Myanmar to free the detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as the military junta dismissed British accusations that she is being held in the nation’s most notorious prison.
Indonesian forces were this week accused of massacring civilians during a raid against separatist guerrillas in Aceh province on Monday.
Thailand’s populist prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, has admitted for the first time that mistakes have been made in his month-long ”eye-for-an-eye” war on drugs that has claimed more than 1 140 lives.
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/ 18 October 2002
With a peppercorn goatee, oversized glasses and clad in white ankle-length robes and Islamic cap, Abu Bakar Ba’aysir looks decidedly unthreatening. But when he gets on to the subjects of Islam and the US, he becomes transformed into the fiery preacher he has been for more than 30 years.
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/ 19 January 2001
Talks between the military junta and the opposition could signal change for Myanmar.