”Astonishing” and ”moving”, were the words used by psychiatrists on Tuesday to describe the scene as Elisabeth Fritzl and five of her children were reunited for the first time. The meeting followed years of separation after three of the children fathered through incest by Josef Fritzl were ”chosen” to live above ground.
DNA tests showed that Austrian Josef Fritzl, who raped his daughter and kept her prisoner in a windowless cellar for 24 years, was the father of her six surviving children, police said on Tuesday. Fritzl has confessed to imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth in the cellar beneath their two-storey home and fathering seven children by her.
Austrians expressed shock and horror on Monday after police arrested a 73-year-old man they say imprisoned and abused his daughter in a windowless basement for 24 years and fathered seven children with her. The woman told them her father Josef lured her into the basement of the block where they lived in the town of Amstetten in 1984, and drugged and handcuffed her before imprisoning her.
Rising food prices have developed into a global crisis, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Friday. Concerns about food security mounted this week as rice prices hit records in Asia, and the United States warned that staples for the world’s hungry were getting much more expensive.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog chief said on Friday United States allegations that Syria secretly built a nuclear reactor with North Korean help would be investigated. ”The agency will treat this information with the seriousness it deserves and will investigate the veracity of the information,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Oil prices were steady on Thursday after retreating from levels just cents below the record trading high established in the previous session on an unexpected drop in United States crude inventories. By afternoon in Europe, the contract was up 25 cents, fetching ,12 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
They knew it would be risky to exhibit a homoerotic version of Christ’s Last Supper, but curators at the museum of Vienna’s Roman Catholic cathedral weren’t ready for a barrage of angry messages and calls to be shut down. The source of the dispute is a retrospective honouring Austria’s cherished artist Alfred Hrdlicka.
A Malian Tuareg politician said in an interview published on Friday that two Austrian tourists held captive by al-Qaeda in the Sahara were not in the country, as previously suspected. ”They are not in Mali. I would know and our president would know,” said Assarid Ag Imbarcaouane.
Austria sought international help on Monday to free two nationals seized three weeks ago in Tunisia after the kidnappers, a group linked to al-Qaeda, extended their deadline for a proposed prisoner swap. Abductors from the al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb are now demanding a ransom of €5-million.
Ministers of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) on Wednesday agreed to keep oil output steady and said record high prices had been driven by factors that were beyond their control. United States crude hit a record of ,95 a barrel on Monday and was trading above on Wednesday.
Letting celebrities get away with drug crimes is sending out the wrong message to impressionable young people, a United Nations report warned on Wednesday. The UN drug control agency has for the first time highlighted the damaging influence drug-using celebrities — such as Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty and Kate Moss in Britain — have on fans.
Opec ministers are poised to hold output steady at a meeting on Wednesday, resisting pressure from top consumer the United States to pump more oil to help prop up a fragile economy. Opec has said triple-digit oil has been driven by factors beyond its control, such as a weak dollar and speculation and not by any lack of fuel.
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/ 15 February 2008
The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) on Friday lowered its projections for growth of oil demand this year in response to a slowdown in world economic momentum. Opec, in its February report, said demand would likely grow by 1,43% this year rather than its previously estimated 1,52%.
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/ 1 February 2008
The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) left unchanged its oil-production ceiling on Friday, snubbing United States demands for an increase as the cartel focuses on supporting prices that have fallen 10% since the start of the year. Explaining its decision, Opec said that stockpiles of crude were likely to increase in the first half of 2008.
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/ 31 January 2008
The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) on Thursday looked set to rebuff consumer calls for more crude oil, saying it was powerless to help stave off recessionary pressures in the West. Enjoying a sixth year of crude price gains, Opec argues it can do little to help avoid a slowdown in the United States, its leading customer.
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/ 29 January 2008
Opec is widely expected to resist consumer calls for more oil when it meets on Friday, worried by a slowing United States economy and the onset of seasonally lower demand in the spring. Oil has fallen to around a barrel from a record ,09 on January 3, easing pressure on Opec to pump more.
A dog was admitted to a veterinary clinic in Austria on the weekend, barely able to stand on his own four paws and reeking "like a beer hall", a newspaper reported on Monday. Dingo, a three-year-old Labrador weighing 40kg, was a pitiful sight when his owner, a hunter, brought him in to the surgery, a newspaper quoted vet Karl Hofbauer as saying.
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/ 27 November 2007
Internationally sponsored talks over the future status of the Serbian province of Kosovo were deadlocked on Tuesday, after Kosovo Albanian leaders rejected Serbia’s proposal for self-governance. Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population wants to break all ties with Serbia.
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/ 26 November 2007
Serbia will not give up ”an inch” of Kosovo, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said on Monday as talks on the breakaway province’s future entered a critical phase before a United Nations deadline next month. ”Serbia will not let an inch of its territory be taken away,” a defiant Kostunica told reporters.
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/ 7 November 2007
Oil prices jumped to a new trading record above $98 a barrel on Wednesday amid expectations of declining United States supplies. The weak dollar and the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’s apparent reluctance to pump more crude into the market also boosted prices.
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/ 5 November 2007
Oil prices fell more than a barrel on Monday as traders pocketed gains from the previous session’s record settlement. The release of eight Turkish soldiers by Kurdish rebels on Sunday also contributed to the decline, easing some concerns about whether Turkey will launch attacks on guerrilla bases in northern Iraq.
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/ 29 October 2007
A mob of about 300 greedy Austrians forced its way into a hotel in southern Austria for a pillaging spree after a newspaper report on free giveaways, local media reported on Monday. The hotel had prior to its being closed down asked interested parties to pre-register and pick up the remaining furniture and equipment.
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/ 17 October 2007
An Austrian baker who made his staff pay for the time they spent in the toilet has been forced to end the practice to avoid a court case, a lawyer said this week. The owner of the bakery in Eisenstadt recorded toilet visits on a computer and took the value of the bathroom time off their annual holiday bonus.
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/ 16 October 2007
The body of a 76-year-old woman found dead in her Vienna flat was left there for nine days because a doctor who registered the death forgot to notify a removal service, officials said on Tuesday. The oversight was noticed when neighbours of the deceased woman, who lived alone, complained of a worsening stench.
A Pakistani man broke the world-record for "ear-lifting" in Vienna on Sunday, carrying almost 62kg from a cord attached to his right ear. Zafar Gill’s feat earned him a place in the <i>Guinness World Records</i>, as part of a day of record-breaking attempts in the Austrian capital, organised under the slogan "Vienna — Recordbreaker".
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/ 25 September 2007
Pictures flicker across a computer screen. A little girl, no more than five or six. Bound and tortured. Raped. Begging Daddy to stop. Horror fiction? No — an ever more alarming reality. ”Eighty percent of the abuse seen in online child porn is done by people the children know,” said Leila Ben Debba, of the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
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/ 19 September 2007
South Africa is holding off joining a United States-led initiative to spread atomic power because it does not want to give up its right to enrich uranium, a senior South African official said on Tuesday. Exporting uranium only to get it back refined, instead of enriching it in South Africa, would be ”in conflict with our national policy”, said Minerals and Energy Affairs Minister Buyelwa Sonjica.
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/ 11 September 2007
Parts of a global nuclear-smuggling ring initiated by the disgraced father of Pakistan’s atom bomb may remain active and nations must do more to crack down on the network, South Africa said on Tuesday. The plea followed last week’s conviction by a South African court of a German engineer for his part in the network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan.
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/ 11 September 2007
Opec was meeting on Tuesday to consider a modest rise in oil output proposed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states in a gesture to consumers worried by the economic impact of oil and rapidly diminishing stocks. But the plan to add 500 000 barrels per day of oil had yet to convince all Opec ministers.
Mankind is to blame for climate change but governments still have time to slow accelerating damage at moderate cost if they act quickly, a draft United Nations report shows. Underlining the need for speed, it says a European Union goal of holding temperature rises to a maximum two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times is almost out of reach.
Climate negotiators from more than 150 nations assembled in Vienna on Monday with calls for a global deal beyond 2012 to replace the United Nations’s Kyoto Protocol and include outsiders such as the United States and China. ”Climate change is already a harsh reality, a massive obstacle to development,” Austrian Environment Minister Josef Proell said.
Central banks in Europe and Japan pumped out tens of billions more dollars on Monday to help commercial banks hit by the United States home-loan sector crisis, as shares bounced back from a turbulent week. The European Central Bank injected another €47,66-billion after putting a record €155,85-billion into the market last Thursday and Friday.