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/ 2 February 2006
Rescue workers found eight more survivors and recovered eight bodies on Thursday as the search continued for people missing two days after a ferry sank in rough waters off eastern Indonesia, officials said. The latest discoveries brought the number of survivors from Tuesday night’s accident to 121.
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/ 2 February 2006
Australian Olympic and world champion Ian Thorpe said he would have to swim faster to beat a South African challenge at next month’s Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, after winning the 100m freestyle final at the trials on Thursday. Thorpe overhauled tearaway leader Ben Hawke to win in 49,28 seconds.
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/ 2 February 2006
Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf summarily sacked the whole staff of the country’s finance ministry during a short surprise visit as she embarked on an anti-corruption campaign. ”All employees of this ministry are hereby dismissed, and will have to apply to come back if they wish,” Johnson-Sirleaf told the employees.
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/ 2 February 2006
The bomb only singed the wall of his home, but Fatah loyalist and former security heavyweight Suleiman Abu Mutleq says the message is crystal clear: Hamas wants a fight. The one-time senior officer in the preventive security force was heavily defeated by the Islamic Resistance Movement in last week’s election.
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/ 2 February 2006
A heavy gunfight broke out before dawn on Thursday between the Mehdi army of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and United States forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City, killing one woman. In other violence, a high ranking official at the industry ministry, Mary Hamza al-Rubai, was kidnapped on her way to work.
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/ 2 February 2006
About 50 000 people on France’s Indian Ocean island of Reunion have been hit by an epidemic of a crippling mosquito-borne disease that has no known cure. Doctors have recorded 45 000 new cases of ”chikungunya” since mid-December, when the epidemic started to gather pace.
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/ 2 February 2006
Dan Catt grabbed his digital camera, went for a walk in the country near where he lives in Stoke on Trent, and ended up being hired by Yahoo. Well, quite a lot happened in between. Such as Catt launching a website called Geobloggers.com to display his pictures, which also enabled other people to put Flickr photos on Google Maps.
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/ 2 February 2006
China has banned Hollywood’s Memoirs of a Geisha a week before it was due to be released over fresh speculation that the Chinese actresses’ roles as Japanese courtesans could spark public controversy. The film tells the story of a girl from a poor Japanese fishing village who is sold to a geisha house and goes on to romance a rich businessman.
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/ 2 February 2006
Newly appointed United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito broke ranks with fellow conservative jurists on his first day on the job, backing a ruling by the court to stay the execution of an inmate in the midwestern state of Missouri. Alito joined the majority in a 6-3 vote that rejected a request by Missouri authorities to execute convicted murderer Michael Taylor.
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/ 2 February 2006
North Korea’s reluctance to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear weapons programme has fuelled speculation the United States may seek to refer the Stalinist state, like Iran, to the United Nations Security Council. Christopher Hill, the chief US negotiator to the nuclear talks, said that Washington might consider other options if North Korea stayed away from the stalled negotiations.