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/ 18 January 2006
The Israeli policemen who wrestled Mohammed Abu Teir off to jail for illegal election campaigning in East Jerusalem this week probably did more to pile on the votes for the red-bearded sheikh than all the handshakes and sloganeering. Sheikh Abu Teir is number two on the list of Hamas candidates for next week’s election to the Palestinian Parliament, but Israel has barred what it classifies as a terrorist organisation from campaigning.
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/ 18 January 2006
Google on Tuesday underscored its ambition to expand beyond its core internet-search business and into traditional media when it announced a deal to acquire a radio-advertising group for up to ,2-billion. The agreement follows a deal struck last year when Google bought up space in technology magazines to resell to its online advertising clients.
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/ 18 January 2006
Strung out along the border with Turkey, Iraq’s Kurdish provinces are scrambling to put in place measures to prevent bird flu from spreading south across the mountains. "We are afraid and in a state of high alert in the face of what could be a time bomb," says Azad Ezzeddin Mulla Afandi, the chief agricultural official for the Kurdish Democratic Party.
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/ 18 January 2006
Americans are getting used to the idea of being led by a female president, with political observers dreaming of a showdown between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Senator Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election. If polls and a television show about a woman president are any indication, Americans appear willing to elect their first woman president.
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/ 18 January 2006
In honour of Dr Albert Hoffman turning 100, I thought a nice trippy column would be my small way of saying, "Thanks, Doc, for all the kick-ass wall-bending times your discovery gave me, in my tweaker days." (And the one or two nightmarish trips, I have to admit. But mostly they really rocked.)
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/ 18 January 2006
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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/ 18 January 2006
”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
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.
Click on image for full-size view.
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/ 17 January 2006
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.