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/ 13 November 2007
New floods triggered by heavy rains in central Vietnam have claimed 11 more deaths and paralysed traffic, trapping thousands of tourists in popular resort areas, officials and local media reported on Tuesday. The remnants of Typhoon Peipah dumped heavy rains on to already flooded areas of the centre of Vietnam.
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/ 13 November 2007
The numbers of women seeking treatment for rape in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has risen as a conflict that has already left four million dead over the past decade has reignited. Human rights groups describe gang rapes as commonplace and often accompanied by ”barbaric” acts of torture.
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/ 13 November 2007
Motorists used to listening to the radio or their favourite tunes on CDs may have a new way to entertain themselves, after engineers in Japan developed a musical road surface. A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of ”melody roads”, which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.
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/ 13 November 2007
France’s President, Nicolas Sarkozy, will on Tuesday night confront the biggest challenge yet to his six-month tenure, when transport and utility workers begin open-ended strike action that could paralyse the country, deepening the sense of a ”November of discontent”.
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/ 13 November 2007
The Finnish teenager responsible for a school massacre last week in which eight people were killed was in direct contact with an American pupil who has admitted planning a similar shooting spree near Philadelphia last month, a lawyer for the United States boy confirmed on Monday.
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/ 13 November 2007
President Thabo Mbeki was involved in the African National Congress (ANC) leadership’s blocking of a parliamentary investigation into alleged bribery by BAE Systems and other weapons firms in South Africa’s biggest arms deal to date, according to a former MP who was driven out of the ANC for spearheading the inquiry.
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/ 13 November 2007
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President, raised domestic tensions over the country’s nuclear policy to higher levels on Monday by labelling his opponents ”traitors” who are working for the West and threatened to expose them in a political witch-hunt.
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/ 13 November 2007
The death penalty is a violation of fundamental human rights, and it should be abolished around the world, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday, ahead of a vote on a draft resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for a moratorium on executions.
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/ 13 November 2007
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon on Monday hailed as a ”significant breakthrough” last week’s agreement by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda to deal with illegal armed groups in the eastern DRC. Ban urged both Kinshasa and Kigali to ”act urgently to implement all the agreed measures”.
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/ 13 November 2007
A kulula.com passenger aircraft turned back to Johannesburg soon after taking off for Cape Town on Monday because of low oil pressure in an engine, Comair said. A spokesperson said flight MN103, scheduled to depart just after noon, turned back to Johannesburg within 40 minutes after the captain received a ”technical alert”.