The British government is considering stepping up the pressure on Zimbabwe by banning its athletes from competing in Britain, the BBC has reported. The Inside Sport programme reported that the ban could notably prevent the Zimbabwe cricket team from touring England next year.
The United Nations in Sudan accused a rebel group on Monday of blocking access to a mountainous area in Darfur where 20 000 people are trapped after fighting between the government and rebels. Ameerah Haq, the UN humanitarian chief for Sudan, said an assessment mission to the Jabel Moun area was denied access by the Justice and Equality Movement.
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/ 27 February 2008
”The birds were flying around like it was daylight,” said David Alrewas, one of the thousands of Britons woken at night by the most severe earthquake to strike Britain in 25 years. The quake, measuring 5,3 on the Richter scale, according to the British Geological Survey, shook large parts of England and Wales at 1am GMT on Wednesday.
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/ 27 February 2008
An earthquake with a magnitude of 5,2 shook parts of Britain on Wednesday but officials said there were no reports of anyone being killed or serious damage. The quake struck about an hour after midnight and many people in the capital London and other areas said they had been woken up by the tremors.
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/ 24 February 2008
Turkish forces used jets and heavy artillery to pound the bases of Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq on Saturday, as a prelude to a major assault in the coming days. Turkish news agencies reported more troops moving towards the remote border area. Turkey is thought to have deployed 1 000 to 3 000 soldiers.
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/ 21 February 2008
At the inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed, Britain’s royals were branded the ”Dracula family” and a former spy chief was made to sweat in the witness box, pledging that assassinations were not part of the ethos of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
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/ 18 February 2008
Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone on Sunday described abuse of Lewis Hamilton in Spain as an ”isolated incident” and said the sport did not need an anti-racism campaign. ”What it does, all of these things, it gives attention to the people that want attention,” the Briton added.
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/ 18 February 2008
France and England meet next Saturday in the Six Nations at the same venue where French World Cup hopes were extinguished by their bitter rivals. New French coach Marc Lievremont has swept out a lot of the old guard and replaced them with fresh faces with a view to rebuilding for the 2011 World Cup.
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/ 16 February 2008
President George Bush set off on Friday on a five-nation tour of Africa, touting American compassion for the poor on a continent where he already basks in high approval ratings. Bush aims to use the week-long Africa voyage, likely his last as US president, to bolster his legacy and highlight efforts to resolve regional disputes.
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/ 15 February 2008
Fifa president Sepp Blatter has opposed plans by the Premier League to play matches abroad and warned that the proposal could harm England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup. ”This is abuse. The rich Premier League is trying to get richer and wants to expand the importance of that league,” Blatter told the BBC.
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/ 15 February 2008
United States President George Bush cited the London July 7 bombings in an interview broadcast on Thursday night to justify his support for waterboarding, an interrogation technique widely regarded as torture. In an interview with the BBC he said information obtained from alleged terrorists helped save lives
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/ 10 February 2008
Britain evacuated of oil workers from a North Sea accommodation platform on Sunday after reports of a bomb threat but officials said the incident was quickly contained and there was no need to send in a bomb squad. Fourteen helicopters were sent to the Safe Scandinavia platform following a security alert, officials said.
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/ 8 February 2008
The religious head of the Anglican church sparked an angry row in the United Kingdom on Friday after saying the adoption of some parts of sharia law alongside Britain’s legal system "seems unavoidable". Leaders across the political spectrum criticised Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s call for "constructive accommodation".
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/ 5 February 2008
China is debating whether to relax control of the internet during the Olympics, allowing access to banned websites such as the BBC, a spokesperson for the organising committee said on Tuesday. Plans to tear down the so-called Great Firewall of China were being debated and a decision was expected soon.
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/ 31 January 2008
The public problems of pop singer Britney Spears are rarely out of the headlines, but now her troubles are being put on the stage by one of Britain’s leading modern dance companies. The Rambert Dance Company have set the 26-year-old’s battles to music and dance in an interpretation called Meltdown.
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/ 28 January 2008
Protests erupted in western Kenya and machete-wielding mobs faced off in the Rift Valley on Monday after scores died in ethnic violence, complicating mediation efforts by former United Nations boss Kofi Annan. In the normally peaceful Rift Valley town of Nakuru, a mortuary worker said on Monday that 64 corpses were lying in the morgue.
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/ 26 January 2008
Police arrested five people, including a doctor, in the suburbs of Delhi early on Saturday morning for allegedly removing kidneys from young men without their permission and selling them to wealthy patients. The illegal organ transplant trade was being run from a private hospital in Gurgaon, just outside Delhi.
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/ 18 January 2008
The pilot of a British Airways jet that crash-landed at London’s Heathrow airport with more than 150 people on board was hailed as a hero on Friday as investigators began their probe into the incident. All 136 passengers and 16 crew escaped without serious injury when the aircraft was forced to land short of the runway on Thursday.
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/ 18 January 2008
There has been much debate about whether the African Cup of Nations should be held at the end of the European season so that there is not a club-versus-country clash. Two football experts discuss the pros and cons. The continental showpiece kicks off in Ghana on Sunday.
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/ 17 January 2008
A British Airways (BA) plane on a flight from China made an emergency landing at London’s Heathrow Airport on Thursday and three people were slightly hurt in an incident police said had no link to terrorism. ”We can confirm that BA Flight 38 arriving from Beijing made an emergency landing,” an airport spokesperson added.
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/ 16 January 2008
Apple has already made waves with its iPod, iPhone and trendy desktop computers, but on Tuesday night the company threw out a new challenge to its competitors, the world’s thinnest laptop. The secretive Silicon Valley company confirmed the launch of the  352 (R16 061) Macbook Air, which measures just 2cm deep.
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/ 15 January 2008
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has defied a ban on reporting from Zimbabwe by staging an undercover trip there which revealed challenges to President Robert Mugabe from within his own party, the broadcaster said on Tuesday. BBC world affairs editor John Simpson spent a week in the Southern African country carrying out interviews and filming.
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/ 14 January 2008
The European Commission said on Monday it will propose tighter restrictions on biofuels next week amid mounting concerns that the energy source can cause unintended environmental and social problems. Biofuels are renewable and environmentally friendlier than fossils, but not completely clean.
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/ 14 January 2008
United States President George Bush on Sunday ratcheted up rhetoric over Iran, lambasting it as ”the world’s leading sponsor of state terror”, and urging America’s closest Arab allies to confront it ”before it is too late”. ”Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere,” he declared in Abu Dhabi.
Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili was on Monday celebrating Orthodox Christmas and victory in a presidential election his opponents called rigged. The central election commission said late on Sunday Saakaashvili had won 52,8% of votes cast on Saturday, almost twice as many as his nearest challenger
A second-string Arsenal side proved strong enough to secure a 2-0 victory at Championship (second division) club Burnley on Sunday and with it a place in Monday’s FA Cup fourth-round draw. The Premier League leaders won with goals by Eduardo da Silva and Nicklas Bendtner, but four other top-flight sides were held by lower league opposition.
Defeated Kenyan opposition presidential candidate Raila Odinga was set Thursday to press his claims of vote fraud at a rally declaring him "the people’s president" despite threats of arrest, as the toll from post-election violence climbed above 340. The government has banned the Nairobi protest rally, one week after the election, over fears of further violence.
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/ 29 December 2007
Benazir Bhutto’s party challenged official versions of the opposition leader’s assassination and accused the government on Saturday of trying to cover up failures just days before planned elections. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda-linked militants denied being behind the killing of the 54-year-old former prime minister.
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/ 27 December 2007
Lewis Hamilton believes the traumatic experiences of his debut season in Formula One can help him emerge as a team leader for McLaren. Hamilton spent most of the campaign embroiled in an increasingly bitter feud with teammate Fernando Alonso, while his team were caught up in the spygate controversy.
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/ 27 December 2007
Egypt is planning to pass a law that would exact royalty payments from anyone found making copies of the country’s ancient monuments or museum pieces, including the pyramids. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said his country wanted to own the copyright to its historic monuments.
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/ 24 December 2007
Uzbekistan’s autocratic ruler Islam Karimov on Sunday tightened his grip on power, when he was re-elected president in an election condemned by opposition activists as illegal and a ”farce”. Karimov won an overwhelming victory despite being ineligible to stand as a candidate.
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/ 16 December 2007
After four years, eight months and 11 days, after the deaths of unknown thousands of Iraqis, after 174 British fallen, and billions expended on reconstruction and the cost of a military mission, on Sunday the British mission in Iraq takes a large step towards being wound up.