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/ 18 January 2006

Asylum laws leave Chechens stranded in Poland

In the corner of the dimly lit entrance hall of a Soviet housing block in the Warsaw suburb of Wolomin, housing Chechen refugees, a middle-aged man toys aimlessly with a large switchblade. Children’s voices ring down from the upper storeys of the building, home to between 200 and 300 Chechens who have fled the war in their north Caucasus homeland to end up at one of 17 refugee centres in Poland.

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/ 18 January 2006

Happily kissed

”I hate New Year. I hate the ironic clamour of Abba singing Happy New Year as yet another vodka-eyed sound engineer tries to pull me towards his chest for a mistletoe moment. I’ve done the New Year permutations. I’ve been on magic mushrooms spitting at a werewolf moon while day-glo ravers swirl by,” writes Shandy Ellis.

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/ 18 January 2006

Nine engineers killed in Baghdad

Nine telecommunications engineers working for the Iraquna cellphone company were killed by gunmen at the company’s headquarters in western Baghdad on Wednesday. Al-Yarmuk Hospital sources said that gunmen broke into the company headquarters in the Jami’a neighbourhood and shot and killed the men.

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/ 17 January 2006

Nasa’s mission to Pluto is ‘good to go’

Nasa prepared to launch an unmanned, piano-sized probe that will fly by Pluto, the solar system’s last unexplored planet, and also study a mysterious zone of icy objects that surrounds the frosty planet at the outer edges of the planetary system. The launch has drawn protests from anti-nuclear activists because the spacecraft will be powered by 11kg of plutonium.