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/ 25 January 2006
Armed police patrolled rooftops of polling centres on Wednesday as activists waving the green flags of Islamist party Hamas and the yellow banners of rival Fatah mingled with Palestinian voters in the impoverished Gaza Strip. "We want things to improve," said the elderly Abu Mohammed, leaning on a wooden cane. "I support Hamas. Why would I vote for Fatah?"
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/ 25 January 2006
A pumped-up Nicolas Kiefer and an ice-cool Amelie Mauresmo drove vastly different roads to park themselves in the Australian Open semifinals on Wednesday. Kiefer was on court for four hours and 48 minutes against Frenchman Sebastien Grosjean, while Mauersmo was back in the dressing room in less than an hour against Switzerland’s Patty Schnyder.
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/ 25 January 2006
First he lost his oil empire, then most of his money, then his freedom. Now prison officials have taken away Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s right to human company by putting him in solitary confinement. Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, has been moved to solitary confinement at the Siberian penal colony where he is serving nine years for fraud after breaking prison rules for a second time.
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/ 25 January 2006
More than 60 Indonesians screamed anti-graft slogans at the top of their lungs in a contest aimed at encouraging the public to speak out against rampant corruption. The loudest yell clocked in at 113,2 decibels — roughly as loud as a chainsaw — and the screamer snared two million rupiah ($200) in prize money.
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/ 25 January 2006
The Kenyan government said the owner and contractor of a building that collapsed, killing at least 14 people, were rushing construction workers to put up new floors even before concrete on the lower level had set properly. Police Commissioner Major General Mohammed Hussein Ali said detectives have opened a criminal investigation into the collapse.
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/ 25 January 2006
The armed Islamist group Hamas is expected to break the ruling Fatah movement’s 40-year domination of the Palestinian cause in bitterly contested parliamentary elections on Wednesday. Fatah is likely to lose its outright majority in Parliament as Hamas emerges as a potential partner in a power-sharing government.
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/ 25 January 2006
At least 12 crocodiles have starved to death on a farm in Serui, Zimbabwe, while another 258 are close to dying, that country’s Herald newspaper reported on Wednesday. It said that some of the four-year-old crocodiles, which were kept in four dry ponds, showed signs of serious skin damage because of extended exposure to the sun.
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/ 25 January 2006
Google, the world’s biggest search engine, will team up with the world’s biggest censor, China, on Wednesday with a service that it hopes will make it more attractive to the country’s 110-million online users. Google will effectively become another brick in the great firewall of China when it starts filtering out information that it believes the government will not approve of.
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/ 25 January 2006
The European Commission approved on Tuesday the €3,1-billion takeover of United State giant Reebok by its German rival Adidas to create the second biggest sports goods firm in the world. Adidas-Saloman immediately hailed the decision, which gives a green light for the transaction nearly six months after it was first announced last August.
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/ 25 January 2006
The Russian Parliament is to discuss spying allegations against four British diplomats who had allegedly channelled funds to NGOs in Russia. The Federal Security Service on Tuesday briefed the Duma over suggestions that the diplomats were undercover agents who had hidden a transmitter in a rock in a Moscow suburb to liaise via palmtop computer with agents in Russia.