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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.
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/ 24 November 2007
Australian Prime Minister John Howard cast his ballot in national elections on Saturday, hoping voters would reject a younger opposition leader offering generational change and return him for a fifth straight term. ”I hope we will win. I believe we will win. It is in the hands of my fellow Australians,” Howard told reporters.
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/ 24 November 2007
Twin suicide blasts killed at least 15 people on Saturday in the Pakistani garrison town of Rawalpindi adjoining Islamabad, the military said, including 13 aboard a Defence Ministry bus. A suicide bomber rammed a car into the back of the bus outside an intelligence-service office.
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/ 24 November 2007
The bodies of 31 victims of a landslide in central China are so badly crushed that DNA samples may be needed to identify them, state media reported on Saturday. A long-distance bus was buried under an avalanche of boulders, earth and mud at the entrance to a railway tunnel being built in Hubei province near China’s massive Three Gorges Dam.
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/ 24 November 2007
A suicide bomb on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Saturday killed six schoolchildren and wounded three Italians working on an aid project building a bridge, an Interior Ministry spokesperson said. ”It was a suicide bomber … six schoolchildren coming out from school were killed,” said Zemarai Bashary.