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/ 28 January 2008
Asian and European stock markets fell sharply again on Monday as investors worried about possible recession and a forthcoming interest-rate call in the United States, analysts said. The Paris market fell amid anxiety and tension after an alleged -billion fraud was unearthed last week at French bank Société Générale.
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/ 28 January 2008
Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton jockeyed for position on Sunday in a bruising United States presidential race after Obama scored a landslide win in a South Carolina primary tinged with the issue of race. ”I think [the result] speaks extraordinarily well, not just for folks in the South, but all across the country,” said Obama.
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/ 26 January 2008
Sixteen years ago, South Carolina and the United States were wowed by a new candidate who seemed less politician than force of nature. He packed halls and school gyms till they were bursting, promising that a new day was coming. Aged just 46, his arrival seemed to presage a generational shift.
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/ 24 January 2008
The United States and other countries must not demonise sovereign wealth funds as they come to the aid of troubled United States banks, some of the world’s biggest state-run investors said on Thursday. A top US official denied the United States feared government-run investment funds, many of them based in Asia, the Gulf and Russia.
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/ 24 January 2008
Global share prices rocketed on Thursday, though fears of an economic slowdown lingered as Société Générale revealed a massive €4,9-billion fraud-related loss it attributed to one of its traders. Europe’s leading share indices surged in morning deals, with gains of between 4% and more than 5% after a recovery on the Japanese market.
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/ 24 January 2008
The United States on Wednesday welcomed the peace agreement reached in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) strife-torn Kivu provinces and urged all parties to ensure its prompt implementation. ”The US welcomes the signing of a peace,” White House spokesperson Dana Perino said in a statement.
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/ 24 January 2008
Climate change is occurring far more rapidly than even the worst predictions of the United Nations Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore said on Thursday. Recent evidence shows "the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than … projections had warned us", he said.
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/ 24 January 2008
Democratic presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton took their escalating war of words to the airwaves on Wednesday, launching radio ads in South Carolina directly attacking each other. Three days ahead of South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary, Clinton aired a radio ad ridiculing Obama’s recent comments.
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/ 22 January 2008
Wall Street was expected to plunge at the opening of trading on Tuesday, extending its huge losses from last week and taking more cues from heavy selling that has spread throughout the world. Indicators showed the Dow Jones industrial average was set to fall by about 500 points when trading begins.
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/ 22 January 2008
Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama engaged in a bitter crossfire on Monday as their United States presidential campaign took an ugly personal turn on the Martin Luther King holiday. Obama’s complaints about former President Bill Clinton’s attacks on him on behalf of his wife’s campaign boiled over at a rancorous debate.
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/ 20 January 2008
Republican John McCain and Democrat Hillary Clinton won heated presidential nominating battles in separate contests in South Carolina and Nevada on Saturday, gaining strength in a chaotic White House race where no candidate has been able to sustain momentum.
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/ 18 January 2008
Israel closed border crossings with the Gaza Strip and destroyed the Hamas-run Interior Ministry on Friday in what witnesses said was an air strike, stepping up what it says is a campaign to halt Palestinian rocket attacks. One woman was killed and at least 30 others nearby were wounded in a large explosion, medical officials said.
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/ 16 January 2008
A right-wing party quit Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government on Wednesday, condemning his peace talks with the Palestinians and leaving him even more politically vulnerable. Olmert had his majority in the 120-member Parliament cut from 78 seats to 67 after Yisrael Beiteinu’s defection.
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/ 16 January 2008
Republican presidential candidates turned their attention to South Carolina on Wednesday with their White House race as wide open as ever with a win by Mitt Romney in Michigan. South Carolina Republicans vote on Saturday in the first contest in the South in the US presidential race.
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/ 15 January 2008
At least three people were killed in an explosion that damaged a United States diplomatic car in Beirut on Tuesday and wounded a US passenger, security sources said. The sources said a total of 16 people were wounded in the explosion, which occurred in a Christian neighbourhood of Beirut. They said no US personnel were killed.
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/ 15 January 2008
Israel killed 15 Palestinians, nearly all of them militants, in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, dealing its deadliest blow to Hamas in more than a year in raids that followed a peace mission by United States President George Bush. A volunteer from Ecuador, working on an Israeli kibbutz, was killed by a Palestinian sniper.
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/ 14 January 2008
United States President George Bush heads to Saudi Arabia on Monday to encourage support for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking by the Arab powerbroker and seek help maintaining American pressure on Iran. Bush will spend two nights in the Islamic kingdom, having already visited Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
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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.
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/ 13 January 2008
Republican rivals Mitt Romney and John McCain clashed on Saturday over how to revive the depressed economy of Michigan, as the most open United States presidential race in decades approached its next big test. Romney needs to win the Republican primary here on Tuesday after losing Iowa to former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and New Hampshire to McCain.
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/ 12 January 2008
President George Bush visited the United States navy’s Fifth Fleet on Sunday amid new tensions with Iran over an incident in which the United States says its ships were harassed in the Strait of Hormuz. Washington says Iranian boats threatened its warships on January 6 along the vital route for crude oil shipments.
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/ 12 January 2008
The United Nations Security Council opened the door on Friday to new economic, political or military sanctions against Sudan because of an attack by its troops on a UN peacekeeping convoy earlier this week. The council said it ”condemns in the strongest possible terms” Monday’s attack on UN peacekeepers by ”elements of the Sudanese armed forces”.
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/ 12 January 2008
Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton on Friday proposed -billion in emergency spending to stave off a possible United States election-year recession, upstaging Republican rivals who clashed over the economy but offered few specifics.
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/ 11 January 2008
The Israeli government said on Friday it endorsed United States President George Bush’s call during his visit for a rapid peace agreement but made clear it does not see the final establishment of a Palestinian state this year. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s spokesperson said that Israel hoped for a ”historic agreement” in 2008.
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/ 11 January 2008
United States President George Bush arrived in Kuwait on Friday to rally the support of Arab allies against what he calls the Iranian "threat" after making a bold prediction for Middle East peace. Bush flew in aboard <i>Air Force One</i> after his first presidential trip to the Holy Land, where he said he believed a peace treaty would be signed within a year.
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/ 11 January 2008
Doubts intensified on Thursday night over the nature of an alleged aggressive confrontation by Iranian patrol boats and American warships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday, after Pentagon officials admitted that they could not confirm that a threat to blow up the US ships had been made directly by the Iranian crews involved in the incident.
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/ 11 January 2008
John Kerry, the senator who ran against George Bush in 2004, endorsed Barack Obama yesterday in a slap in the face to Hillary Clinton and to John Edwards, his vice-presidential running mate in 2004. ”Martin Luther King Jr said the time is always right to do what is right,” Kerry told a rally in South Carolina.
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/ 11 January 2008
United States President George Bush made his most explicit call for an end to the Israeli occupation after making his first visit to the West Bank on Thursday, where he witnessed Israel’s military checkpoints, the vast West Bank barrier and the spread of Jewish settlements.
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/ 10 January 2008
United States President George Bush on Thursday predicted the signing of a Middle East peace treaty in a year and called for an end to Israel’s four-decade occupation of Palestinian land. Giving an assessment of his talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders over the past two days, he said it was time for both to make ”difficult choices”.
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/ 10 January 2008
The unpredictable fight for the White House went national on Wednesday as candidates fanned out across the United States and Democrat Barack Obama bounced back from a surprise loss to Hillary Clinton to grab a coveted union endorsement.
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/ 10 January 2008
Embarking on his first visit to Jerusalem as United States President, George Bush pressed Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Wednesday to seize what he called an historic opportunity and make tough concessions for peace. Defying sceptics who doubt he can deliver on a pledge to seek a deal on a Palestinian state before he leaves office in a year, Bush said he was ”very hopeful”.
African Union chief John Kufuor met Kenyan leaders on Wednesday to try to break a political deadlock following disputed presidential polls that sparked widespread violence and left at least 600 dead. President Mwai Kibaki, whose re-election 11 days ago triggered the unrest, denied there was any national crisis in his meeting with Kufuor.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards accused the United States of fabricating footage claiming to show Iranian speedboats harassing US warships in the Strait of Hormuz, state television reported. ”The footage released by the US Navy are file pictures and the audio has been fabricated,” a source in the naval section of the Revolutionary Guards was quoted as saying.