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/ 27 October 2005
United States President George Bush announced on Thursday that his choice to fill a US Supreme Court vacancy, Harriet Miers, had withdrawn her nomination. The surprise withdrawal of Miers’s nomination comes just over three weeks after she was recommended for the high-profile legal post by Bush on October 3.
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/ 27 October 2005
Tour de France organisers unveiled the 20-stage 2006 edition in Paris on Thursday which will be held next July 1-23 and totalling around 3 600km. It will be the first not to feature seven-time winner Lance Armstrong, who is now retired, but the American was a hot topic despite the presence of several of his potential successors.
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/ 27 October 2005
Dozens of people were wounded, one of them seriously, on Thursday in clashes between rival factions in the bitter campaign for next month’s referendum on Kenya’s draft Constitution, police and witnesses said. In addition to the injuries, many caused by machete-wielding rioters, a car belonging to a Kenyan lawmaker was set ablaze when then two camps attacked each other in the west of the country.
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/ 27 October 2005
The Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, on Thursday promised a wide-ranging retaliation against Palestinian militants following Wednesday’s suicide bombing that killed five people. The bomber struck near a falafel stand in Hadera, a busy coastal market town, scattering metal shrapnel that shattered windows and destroyed cars.
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/ 27 October 2005
Protests continued at the University of Zululand on Thursday, with an Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) student wing saying political tensions between itself and an African National Congress-aligned student movement had reached ”terrible” proportions.
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/ 27 October 2005
The United Nations has urged India and Jordan, the top contributors to the UN peacekeeping force in Ethiopia and Eritrea, not to withdraw their troops over restrictions imposed by Asmara. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has asked the two countries to delay any decisions about staffing the UN mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea in the hope that a stalemate over the Eritrean restrictions can be resolved.
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/ 27 October 2005
It probably gives an unsettling colour but it may also relieve the hangover. A fashion for mixing whisky with antioxidant-rich green tea has doubled Scotland’s exports of whisky to China in the last year, with £1-billion (about R12-billion) exported in the past six months alone.
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/ 27 October 2005
Doctors treating soccer star George Best said on Thursday he is stable as he fights for his life. The former Manchester United star, who had a life-saving liver transplant three years ago but went back to hard drinking, has been in a hospital’s intensive-care unit for a month. His condition deteriorated dramatically on Wednesday.
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/ 27 October 2005
Israel intensified demands on Thursday for Tehran to be expelled from the United Nations amid an international outcry over a call by Iran’s president for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map. The international community expressed outrage at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory speech.
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/ 27 October 2005
”Problems” with an electronic signalling system could have caused Wednesday night’s head-on collision between the Blue Train and a Shosholoza Meyl passenger train, Spoornet’s chief executive said. The Northern Cape health department said five people were critically injured in the collision.