Staff Reporter
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/ 26 October 2006

The Manhattan of La Mancha

The huge roadside billboards along the new motorway that ploughs its way through barren, yellowed fields in the central Spanish province of Toledo promise a glittering and happy future to those who wish to come and live here. Behind them dust billows up from trucks that crisscross a giant, uninhabited new town where dozens of ugly, high-rise blocks are hurriedly emerging.

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/ 26 October 2006

Karadzic captured … at least in the Hollywood version

He has eluded United States special forces, elite French paratroopers and Britain’s finest, the SAS. But Radovan Karadzic, genocide suspect and regarded by Serbs as a Scarlet Pimpernel-style figure, has finally met his match in Richard Gere. In a film being shot on Thursday on the forested hillsides of northern Zagreb, the Hollywood heartthrob succeeds where Nato, the CIA and the SAS have failed.

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/ 26 October 2006

Buses hijacked in W Cape taxi protest

A bus was burned and two were hijacked during a violent protest by taxi drivers in Cape Town on Thursday morning, the Golden Arrow bus company said. One of the hijacked buses was used to block off the N2 highway. Bus passengers and drivers were injured by shattered glass due to numerous stonings, the company said.

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/ 26 October 2006

Wallabies plan backline experiments

The Wallabies are set for some revolutionary positional changes on next month’s four-Test European tour as they look ahead to next year’s Rugby World Cup in France. Coach John Connolly is tinkering with a revamp of the backline to maximise Australia’s chances of challenging World Cup favourites New Zealand and France.

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/ 26 October 2006

CIA tried to silence EU on torture flights

The CIA tried to persuade Germany to silence European Union protests about the human rights record of one of the United States’s key allies in its clandestine torture flights programme, the Guardian can reveal. According to a secret intelligence report, the CIA offered to let Germany have access to one of its citizens, an al-Qaeda suspect being held in a Moroccan cell.

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/ 26 October 2006

Radio host apologises to Michael J Fox

Parkinson’s disease has become the latest battleground in the American midterm elections, with the rightwing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh locked in an unseemly wrangle with the actor and Parkinson’s sufferer Michael J Fox. Limbaugh was forced to apologise to the actor after he accused Fox of exaggerating the symptoms of his illness in an election television advert

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/ 26 October 2006

Starbucks, the coffee beans and the copyright row

Starbucks, the giant United States coffee chain, has used its muscle to block an attempt by Ethiopia’s farmers to copyright their most famous coffee bean types, denying them potential earnings of up to -million a year, said Oxfam. The development agency said the Ethiopian government last year filed copyright applications to trademark its most famous coffee names.