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/ 23 January 2008
Palestinian militants blew up part of the wall between Gaza and Egypt on Wednesday, and tens of thousands of Palestinians poured into Egypt to stock up on food and fuel in short supply due to an Israeli blockade. Egyptian riot police sent to reinforce the border mainly stood aside and let the Palestinians through.
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/ 22 January 2008
Weddings in the dark, disgusted tourists and business owners leaving the country are some of the effects Eskom’s power failures are having, according to postings on a website dedicated to the problem. In the first 48 hours of operation, www.eskomstories.co.za has received about 2Â 000 letters.
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/ 22 January 2008
Guns were fired on Tuesday at the Gaza-Egypt border during protests against Israel’s blockade of the coastal strip. Dozens of Palestinian protesters stormed the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, pushing past Egyptian riot police, live footage from the al-Jazeera TV network showed.
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/ 22 January 2008
The European Union’s exective commission fine-tuned a blueprint to slash the bloc’s greenhouse gas emissions amid lobbying on Tuesday over details which environmentalists said over indulged oil companies and airlines. The EU is trying to lead the global fight against climate change without harming a fragile economy.
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/ 22 January 2008
The World Bank and African Development Bank, acting over the turmoil in Kenya, said on Tuesday they may have to adjust lending programmes if unrest persists following a disputed poll. ”We wish to continue working with the people of Kenya … but it is difficult to do so effectively in an environment of instability,” they said.
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/ 22 January 2008
Internet protocol (IP) addresses, a string of numbers that identifies a computer, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union’s group of data privacy regulators said on Monday. Google insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is.
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/ 22 January 2008
Former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan was due to arrive in Kenya on Tuesday to try to mediate in a post-poll crisis that has torn the country in two and triggered weeks of violence that has killed hundreds. A hotly disputed election returned President Mwai Kibaki to power last month amid cries from opposition leader Raila Odinga that he rigged it.
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/ 22 January 2008
The West must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the ”imminent” spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the West’s most senior military officers and strategists.
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/ 21 January 2008
Gaza endured a fourth day of hardship on Monday as Israel vowed to maintain a punishing blockade in response to rocket fire from the Hamas-run territory, despite increasing international concern over a developing humanitarian crisis. The European Union slammed what it termed the ”collective punishment” of impoverished Gaza’s 1,5-million residents.
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/ 21 January 2008
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pledged on Monday to hold free elections as he began a four-country European trip aimed at winning international support. Musharraf’s popularity has slumped over recent months in Pakistan, which has been racked by militant attacks, and faces a parliamentary election on February 18.
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/ 21 January 2008
Britain set a two-week deadline for a private-sector rescue of Northern Rock on Monday, as it confirmed plans to convert its billions of pounds of loans to the stricken bank into bonds in a bid to smooth a deal. The financing package will tie the government to Northern Rock, Britain’s biggest casualty of the global credit crunch, for years to come.
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/ 20 January 2008
A twin-engine plane slammed into a mountain in rain and fog in Angola’s central highlands, killing at least 11 people, state media reported. Angolan National Radio said there were no survivors among the 11 people on board the Beechcraft-200 when it crashed on Saturday morning.
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/ 20 January 2008
Kenya’s opposition party, determined to bring down the government of President Mwai Kibaki, has called for another day of ”peaceful rallies” across Kenya in defiance of a ban and despite the deaths of more than 20 people in this week’s demonstrations.
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/ 19 January 2008
Cuba will support crisis-riddled Zimbabwe, which is being ”punished” by the West for seizing white-owned farms, the Cuban ambassador was quoted as saying in Harare on Saturday. Cosme Torres Espinoza told reporters that there were similarities in the way the United States treated Cuba and Zimbabwe.
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/ 16 January 2008
United States farmers have been given the green light to produce cloned meat for the human food chain. In a 968-page report billed as a ”final risk assessment” of the technology, the US Food and Drug Administration has concluded that healthy cloned animals and products from them such as milk are safe for consumers.
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/ 16 January 2008
Youths erected roadblocks, shopkeepers nailed up windows and Kenyan riot police guarded streets before opposition protests planned for Wednesday against President Mwai Kibaki’s re-election. Police have banned the rallies, scheduled for midday (9am GMT), and many Kenyans were staying at home for fear of trouble.
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/ 15 January 2008
Kenya’s new government and opposition clashed in Parliament for the first time on Tuesday in a bad-tempered session reflecting deep bitterness over the disputed re-election of President Mwai Kibaki. Despite demands for urgent action to end a crisis in which hundreds have been killed, opposition and government legislators argued for an hour.
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/ 15 January 2008
Turkish warplanes attacked Kurdish guerrilla targets in northern Iraq on Tuesday, Turkey’s General Staff said, but there were no reports of casualties or serious damage. The latest strike follows a series of cross-border raids on Kurdistan Workers’ Party positions in the mountainous region in December.
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/ 15 January 2008
The dispute over President Mwai Kibaki’s re-election in Kenya moved to Parliament on Tuesday as the government and opposition prepared to wrestle for control of the East African nation’s legislature. Roads were closed and riot police ringed the building in downtown Nairobi from early morning before the opening session of the new Parliament.
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/ 14 January 2008
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern expressed ”great concern” over the economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe at the outset of a visit to South Africa on Monday.
”I would like to thank President [Thabo] Mbeki for his work as the SADC [Southern African Development Community] mediator in Zimbabwe,” Ahern said.
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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
European Union competition regulators said on Monday they would launch two new antitrust probes against Microsoft, opening fresh fronts in their battle against the United States software giant’s dominant market power. The European Commission said one investigation targeted the interoperability of a broad range of software with rival products.
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/ 14 January 2008
Zimbabwe will prohibit foreign observers deemed to be biased from overseeing its upcoming presidential and legislative elections, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said on Monday. ”Our stance on foreign observers is that they are not a legal requirement,” Chinamasa was quoted as saying by the state-controlled Herald newspaper.
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/ 14 January 2008
Kenya’s feuding parties prepared on Monday for fresh duels in parliament and on the streets despite another international push to mediate a post-election crisis that has now killed at least 612 people. But for many around the East African nation, the top priority was getting millions of children back to their studies.
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/ 13 January 2008
The unimaginable has happened, to the displeasure of arrogant Europe. Africa, thought to be so poor that it would agree to anything, has said no in rebellious pride. No to the straitjacket of the economic partnership agreements (EPAs), no to the complete liberalisation of trade, no to the latest manifestations of the colonial pact.
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/ 13 January 2008
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s talk of creating a new growth and well-being index for France is part of a mounting global campaign that many economists believe will shape civilisation and democracy in the 21st century. Sarkozy presented his recruitment of Nobel prize-winning economists Jospeh Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to work on a quality-of-life index.
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/ 13 January 2008
Up to a million migrants have gathered in Libya, from where they will attempt to sail across the Mediterranean for Europe and, ultimately, the United Kingdom. New estimates reveal that there are two million migrants massed in the North African country and that half of them plan to sail to the European mainland and travel on to Britain in the hope of building a new life.
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/ 11 January 2008
The Turkish army on Friday pounded areas across the border in northern Iraq with artillery fire, continuing its assaults on suspected rebel positions, a Kurdish border guard official said. Major General Jabar Yawar, spokesperson for the Peshmerga border guard in Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan area, said that there were no immediate reports of casualties.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has called for the Presidency to break its silence over the ongoing fracas in Kenya. ”An upfront reiteration by the South African Presidency that it will not countenance ballot rigging and improper retention of power would be both appropriate and timeous,” the DA’s Tony Leon said.
The threat of open conflict between Sudan and neighbouring Chad is rising, with each side accusing the other of seeking to destabilise their already tense common border. Sudan said on Sunday it was ready for any Chadian attack the day after Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno said his forces would pursue rebels into Sudan’s region of Darfur.
Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno on Saturday threatened to pursue and strike Chadian rebels inside neighbouring Sudan and repeated charges that Khartoum was trying to destabilise his country. Déby claimed his forces had already driven out the rebels from Chad and said: ”We’re going to destroy them in their nest inside Sudan.”
Georgia’s opposition called for its supporters to take to the streets on Sunday after a disputed exit poll showed incumbent Mikheil Saakashvili winning in the first round of a snap presidential vote. Saakashvili predicted victory, saying in a statement that independent exit polls "show that we are winning in the first round".