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/ 27 January 2006
Georgia announced on Friday a deal with Iran to provide natural gas from the start of next week, offering hope of relief following a severe disruption to energy supplies as a result of a mysterious attack on the main pipeline from neighbouring Russia. President Mikheil Saakashvili hailed the deal struck in Tehran.
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/ 7 November 2005
Bart Bryant fended off a challenge from world number one Tiger Woods on Sunday to post a six-shot win at the ,5-million PGA Tour Championship that surprised even himself. Retief Goosen, who started the day in second place, was off his game, leaving it to Woods to provide the only real threat.
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/ 5 November 2005
Defending champion Retief Goosen of South Africa posted a second-round 66 on Friday to grab a share of the lead alongside Bart Bryant at the ,5-million US PGA Tour Championship. Bryant, who opened with a course-record 62 on Thursday, birdied two of his first three holes on Friday.
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/ 1 November 2005
A man who admitted throwing a live grenade toward United States President George Bush during a rally in Georgia acted alone and had no links to foreign nations. Vladimir Arutyunian, who was indicted in September by a US grand jury on charges of trying to assassinate the president, will face trial in Georgia soon, said Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili.
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/ 15 September 2005
City officials in the capital of ex-Soviet Georgia voted to rename a street after United States President George Bush, an official statement released on Thursday said. The decision to rename the rundown residential street was taken at a council meeting on Wednesday.
Curtis Brown carries business cards with old pictures of his tumours, including an egg-sized growth on his neck. He says they were each shed after the application of a flesh-eating paste containing the medicinal herb bloodroot. ”I cured myself of cancer,” the cards read.
A man suspected of throwing a hand grenade at United States President George Bush was arrested in Georgia on Wednesday night, but not before he shot dead a police officer involved in the hunt. Interior ministry officials said the man had been cornered in a suburb of the capital Tbilisi and a shootout ensued in which the policeman was killed and another wounded.
Runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks wanted to vanish because she feared she could not be the perfect wife. She picked Austin, Texas, as her original destination after seeing actor Matthew McConaughey talk about his hometown on TV. And she funded her odyssey by cashing a cellphone rebate check and emptying an old bank account.
A hand grenade thrown at George Bush in Georgia last week was live and could have exploded, says the FBI. But Georgian officials insist the explosive device found during the pro-democracy speech Bush gave in the capital was an ”engineering grenade” which would have had to be very close to the US president to cause any damage.
Canadian Gord Fraser won the final stage of the Tour de Georgia on Sunday, as American Tom Danielson of Lance Armstrong’s Discovery Channel team claimed the overall victory. Sunday’s run produced just one significant break, as Italian Andrea Tafi of Prodir-Saunier Duval made a move at the halfway mark.
Six-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong announced on Monday that he plans to retire from cycling after seeking a seventh consecutive victory along the French roadways next July. ”It will be the last one, win or lose. Having said that, I’m fully committed to winning a seventh title,” Armstrong said.
Lance Armstrong is set to make an announcement on Monday that is expected to settle questions on whether he will retire from cycling after this summer’s Tour de France, where he will try for a seventh straight title. Earlier this month, Armstrong called retirement ”a possibility” and said ”I am still thinking about that”.
Golfing order was restored at Augusta National on Sunday. Tiger Woods is Masters champion, for a fourth time, and back on top of the world rankings. Suddenly all the early season talk of the ”Fab Four” — Woods, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson and Ernie Els — is all sounding a bit hollow.
Just when the chasing pack convinced themselves that Tiger Woods was human after all and there was nothing to fear from the player who in 2000 and 2001 took golf to a level never before seen, the nightmare is back. After a nearly three-year ”slump” as he rebuilt his swing, the world number one is back.
Runaway Masters leader Chris DiMarco kept his cool in Augusta in the third round on Saturday when he held off a charging Tiger Woods and Denmark’s Thomas Bjorn. All three, along with 41 other players, will have to return early on Sunday morning to finish their rounds after darkness halted play.
The Masters is all about tradition. The returning champions. The Crow’s Nest. The Hogan Bridge. Well, there’s one tradition those guys in the green jackets would gladly abandon. Bad weather. In what has become a mud-stained rite of spring, the pristine grounds of Augusta National were a gooey mess, the opening major of the year totally out of whack after two days of thunderstorms.
On a rain-soaked opening to the Masters, Casey Wittenberg made the turn with a two-under 34 and a share of the early lead on Thursday, while David Duval showed signs of snapping out of a mystifying slump. Much of the attention was on Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Ernie Els and defending champion Phil Mickelson.
Tiger Woods is still the main attraction at the Masters. But he no longer is the main event. Phil Mickelson is the defending champion when the 69th Masters begins on Thursday, and many believe he is primed to join Woods, Nick Faldo and Jack Nicklaus as the only consecutive winners of a green jacket.
South African Retief Goosen admits he is not playing well enough to turn golf’s ”Big Four” into the ”Big Five”. Despite two US Open championships to his name, Goosen has arrived at Augusta National searching for the game that has taken him to fifth in the world rankings behind Vijay Singh, Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson.
Ernie Els insists the bitter disappointment of last year’s Masters, when he was beaten by Phil Mickelson’s last-hole birdie, is behind him now. And the Big Easy is raring to go and finally add a Masters title to his two US Opens and British Open victories. ”My expectations here have always been to win the tournament,” said Els.
Jesper Parnevik’s attempt to win the Masters golf tournament got off to an embarrassing start in Georgia when the Swede arrived for a practice round on Sunday — he had forgotten to bring his clubs. The eccentric Swede, who once claimed he ate volcanic dust, admitted he had no one to blame but himself.
Phil Mickelson made a 20-foot birdie putt on the fourth play-off hole on Monday to win the BellSouth Classic over Rich Beem and give the defending US Masters champion momentum heading to Augusta. Mickelson, Jose Maria Olazabal, Beem, Jobe Brandt and Arjun Atwal tied at eight-under 208 after the final round to set up the play-off.
Phil Mickelson carded a seven-under 65 to move into contention after a lengthy Sunday at the -million PGA BellSouth Classic, which finally saw the weather take a turn for the better. Mickelson is tied with Billy Mayfair (71) and two-time Masters champion Jose Maria Olazabal (69). The trio is stalking American Scott McCarron.
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/ 5 February 2005
The Prime Minister of Georgia, Zurab Zhvania, was found dead in an apartment in Tbilisi early on Thursday, apparently poisoned by carbon monoxide from a faulty gas heater. The body of a friend, Raul Usupov, the deputy governor of the Kvemo-Kartli region, was also found in the prime minister’s apartment.
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/ 9 November 2004
Researchers working off coastal Georgia have discovered what could be three new species of bottom-dwelling creatures known as sea squirts. The diminutive creatures — also known as tunicates — were recently found at Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary, a reef 28km east of Georgia’s Sapelo Island.
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/ 21 October 2004
The small frogs that croaked in Diane Butler’s backyard pond had been silenced and her goldfish were disappearing. But she had bagged the culprit, and stashed the body in her freezer. Butler’s capture of an 11cm Cuban tree frog in coastal Savannah has caused a nervous stir among wildlife biologists in Georgia and Florida.
An electricity blackout left much of Georgia in darkness on Friday, stranding thousands of people in subway cars and cutting off water supplies in the capital of one of the world’s poorest countries. A break in high-tension wires cut off power at 1.30pm local time.
Fans of Alicia Keys keep calling her number, but only JD Turner of Statesboro picks up the phone. Turner has the same number that Keys references in her love song Diary. ”I get 20 to 25 calls a day,” Turner said. ”Sometimes at 4:30am, and they say, ‘I want to talk to Alicia Keys.”’
Group of Eight (G8) leaders on Thursday issued a day pass for their rich nations club to counterparts from Africa, on the last day of an annual summit clouded by new transatlantic squabbles. G8 giants were to lunch with leaders of Algeria, Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda.
World leaders, looking for quicker, more effective responses to wars in Africa and other crises, are expected to offer training and equipment for more than 50 000 peacekeepers over the next five years, United States officials said. They said President George Bush’s administration is negotiating with congress for -million in funding over the next five years for the plan.
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/ 29 December 2003
Unidentified assailants on Monday shelled the studios of a top independent television station, damaging the building but hurting no one as the ex-Soviet republic is preparing for parliamentary elections. The offices of the Rustavi-2 station were shelled from a grenade launcher shortly before dawn on Monday.
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/ 2 December 2003
The most famous and influential Georgian in world politics since Joseph Stalin, Eduard Shevardnadze, finally bowed out last weekend after controlling his small, but strategically crucial, country for more than a generation. This is how Shevardnadze went from glasnost hero to hated lame duck.