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/ 24 November 2007
The laborious work starts well before dawn. Frigid temperatures greet pickers like Ebrahim Baratnejad as they head for the fields to set about the crocuses that yield up one of the most precious ingredients of the Eastern kitchen. But despite the fiddly work extracting saffron stigmas from the flowers, he is a picture of contentment.
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/ 24 November 2007
Selina Akello sits in a clearing between the mud huts in her village. ”I will tell you anything,” she says. An older man passes within earshot, but she does not falter. This conversation would have been impossible a few years ago; Akello has the disease that used to be called ”slim” because people wasted away. Now it is called HIV/Aids.
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/ 24 November 2007
Australia’s Labour party claimed victory in national elections on Saturday, signalling an end to 11 years of conservative government led by Prime Minister John Howard. "On the numbers we are seeing tonight, Labour is going to form a government," Labour’s deputy leader, Julia Gillard, told Australian television.
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/ 24 November 2007
French officials are proposing to cut off the broadband connections of people who illegally download films or music over the internet. In the country’s hardest crackdown yet on online file sharing, President Nicolas Sarkozy said that he is backing a ”three strikes” policy against internet pirates.
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/ 24 November 2007
New York City, once widely feared for its mean streets scarred by random violence, is on course for its lowest murder rate in four decades with this year’s total expected to be below 500. A steady decline in the Big Apple’s violent-crime rate has left the city basking in a new-found glow of safety.
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/ 24 November 2007
Nearly one-third of Swaziland’s children are considered orphaned and vulnerable as Aids takes its toll on the country, a study commissioned by the state’s emergency-response council said on Friday. Life expectancy in the country dropped from 60 years in 1997 to the world’s lowest of 31,3 in 2004.
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/ 24 November 2007
Insurgents fired a barrage of mortars into an Ethiopian army camp in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, on Friday, triggering heavy fighting, residents said. The clashes shattered a fortnight lull in the city after weeks of heavy fighting that had claimed dozens of lives, mainly of civilians, and displaced at least 200 000 people.
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/ 24 November 2007
Lebanon edged closer to chaos on Friday when President Emile Lahoud ordered the army to take charge of security after political rivalries blocked the election of his successor hours before his term expired. The pro-Syrian head of state said the country risked descending into a state of emergency.
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/ 24 November 2007
A helicopter pilot described on Friday how he had been forced to drink his own urine and eat leaves to survive for eight days and nights after crashing in the depths of the Kenyan jungle. Solomon Nyanjui broke several ribs when his helicopter crashed on November 15 in the Mount Kenya region.
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/ 24 November 2007
Officials stepped up the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from coastal villages in the eastern Philippines and Vietnam as separate typhoons neared their coasts on Saturday. Typhoon Mitag was about 200km east of the Philippine island province of Catanduanes in the Bicol region late on Friday.