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/ 26 December 2005
Housing being provided by India in the tsunami-battered Andamans is ”totally unsuitable”, a United Nations expert said, while thousands of survivors crammed into tin shacks begged for proper housing a year after the disaster. Miloon Kothari, the UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing, criticised living conditions in the archipelago.
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/ 26 December 2005
Cameroon, on the west coast of Africa, relies heavily on its trade in tropical wood. No one knows for sure exactly how much it makes from these exports. But according to estimates, about half is from trees illegally felled. Environmental activists have been protesting for years against such tropical rainforest logging.
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/ 26 December 2005
Eager for a dose of winter, Kenyans are stepping out of blazing equatorial heat into the chill of East Africa’s first ice rink for halting forays into sports normally associated with colder climes. Would-be Kenyan hockey stars and figure skaters have been flocking to the Solar Ice Rink in Nairobi since it opened this month.
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/ 26 December 2005
Austria will celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth next year in what promises to be an extravaganza for souvenir hunters. ”The ‘Mozart’ brand is one of the best known in the world,” said Arthur Oberascher, head of the Austrian National Tourist Office, estimating its value at about €5,4-billion.
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/ 26 December 2005
Masked, black-clad and brandishing machetes, the attackers sprang from behind a screen of tall grass and pounced on the four Christian girls as they walked to school. Within seconds, three of the teenagers were beheaded — fresh victims of violence that has turned the Indonesian island of Poso into yet another front in the terrorist wars.
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/ 26 December 2005
With new hotels springing up and existing ones getting makeovers, Rwanda is trying to shake off once and for all its image as a land of state-sponsored killing and rivers of blood to draw larger numbers of well-heeled tourists to enjoy its scenery and rare wildlife.
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/ 26 December 2005
A continental rifting process that normally takes millions of years to form has developed over a span of seven weeks in the Afar region of north-eastern Ethiopia. It was a close study, using radar interferometry, of an earth rupture developing into a rare axial rift zone — a future possible ocean basin.
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/ 26 December 2005
It was July 2 1938, start of the school summer holidays, and Erwin Goldberg, a 24-year-old teacher, was cheerful as he strode home. His mood changed minutes later. In his post box was a letter from the Berlin police president’s office on the Alexander Platz. It informed him he was to be taken into custody and had to ”leave the country within 24 hours”.
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/ 26 December 2005
A Danish historian who has been fascinated by Napoleon since he was a young boy is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz by recreating the scene with 6 100 tin soldiers, 1 000 horses and 34 cannons. He has devoted the past 30 years to his ”insatiable passion”: recreating the emperor’s wars.
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/ 25 December 2005
A powerful earthquake shook Pakistan’s capital on Sunday, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage. Earlier on Sunday, Indonesia’s Nias island was hit by three strong tremors ahead of the arrival of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was to celebrate Christmas on the mainly Christian island.