The British government has no plans for a blanket ban on sportsmen from Zimbabwe, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s spokesperson said on Tuesday, rebuffing a report from the BBC. The spokesperson said Downing Street had been ”surprised” by the report suggesting that Britain was considering such a ban.
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 West cast doubt on Russia’s presidential election on Monday after Dmitry Medvedev won a landslide victory and vowed to follow the course set by outgoing leader Vladimir Putin. Near complete results gave Medvedev 70,2% of Sunday’s vote, crushing his nearest rival, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who won 17,8%.
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/ 27 February 2008
Protesters scaled the roof of Britain’s Parliament in a major security breach on Wednesday and threatened further direct action against government plans to expand London’s Heathrow airport. Environmental protesters from the ”Plane Stupid” group scaled the Houses of Parliament.
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/ 24 February 2008
Western oil giants are poised to enter southern Iraq to tap the country’s vast reserves, despite the ongoing threat of violence, according to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s business emissary to the country. Basra has been described as ”the lung” of Iraq by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
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/ 20 February 2008
Tony Blair’s hopes of becoming Europe’s first president are running into mounting opposition across the European Union, with Germany determined to stymie the former prime minister. ”There was surprise in Berlin when Blair’s name came up so soon,” said a European ambassador.
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/ 12 February 2008
The odds are against Zimbabwe’s elections next month being free or fair despite South African efforts to mediate between President Robert Mugabe and the opposition, Britain’s Africa minister said. ”We want to keep an open mind on this … but the omens and early signs are not good,” said Mark Malloch-Brown.
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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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/ 30 January 2008
Kenya on Wednesday pledged tougher action to rein in post-election violence that threatens to spiral out of control, in the East African nation’s darkest moment since independence in 1963. Protests over President Mwai Kibaki’s disputed re-election in the December 27 vote have degenerated into cycles of killing between rival tribes.
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/ 29 January 2008
Any attempt to use the Beijing Olympics to discredit China or force it to change policy is doomed to failure, the leading communist party newspaper said on Tuesday. The counter-attack comes amid a rough week for the Olympic organisers, who have had to admit concealed fatalities on the construction site.
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/ 23 January 2008
The annual Davos gathering of the world’s political and business elite opened on Wednesday with the fragile state of the world economy and stock-market turmoil casting a pall over the glitzy get-together. In recent years the annual meeting in the Swiss ski resort has been held against a backdrop of bumper corporate profits, strong economic growth and tame inflation.
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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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/ 19 January 2008
Investigators said on Friday that the engines of a British Airways Boeing 777 failed to respond to demands for more thrust shortly before it crash-landed at London’s Heathrow International Airport on Thursday. Thirteen people were injured when British Airways flight 83 from Beijing came down well short of the southern runway.
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/ 19 January 2008
In the same way as commentators refer to the 1900s as the ”American century”, the 21st century is forecast to be Asian. If the scale and speed of growth can be maintained on both sides of the Himalayas, by 2050 Beijing and Delhi will be the capitals of the world’s two richest nations.
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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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/ 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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/ 17 January 2008
Deepening divisions within Nato over its military operations in Afghanistan emerged on Wednesday after Robert Gates, the United States Defence Secretary, said America’s allies did not know how to fight insurgencies. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Nato’s Secretary General, rejected the criticism.
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/ 10 January 2008
Britain gave the go-ahead to a new generation of nuclear power stations on Thursday, setting no limits on nuclear expansion and adding momentum to atomic energy’s worldwide renaissance. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government argues Britain must build new nuclear plants to help meet its climate-change goals.
Diplomatic efforts accelerated on Wednesday to resolve the crisis in Kenya, where post-election violence has threatened to escalate into tribal war, with tens of thousands displaced and hundreds murdered. The dispute over last week’s presidential ballot has triggered Kenya’s worst urban unrest in 25 years.
President Mwai Kibaki’s government accused rival Raila Odinga’s backers on Wednesday of responsibility for an explosion of tribal violence over a disputed presidential poll that has plunged Kenya into turmoil. ”Supporters of Raila Odinga are involved in ethnic cleansing,” said spokesperson Alfred Mutua.
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/ 31 December 2007
Pakistani officials were to meet on Monday to decide the fate of scheduled January 8 elections, after Benazir Bhutto’s party announced it would contest the vote despite her assassination. The vote, seen as a key step in the nuclear-armed nation’s transition back to democracy after eight years of military rule, has been thrown into disarray by her slaying.
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/ 27 December 2007
World leaders voiced outrage at the assassination on Thursday of Pakistan’s opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and expressed fears for the fate of the nuclear-armed state. United States President George Bush condemned the killing as a ”cowardly act”.
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/ 27 December 2007
United Nations officials were on Wednesday night working to prevent the expulsion from Afghanistan of two senior Western diplomats who have been accused of holding illegal talks with Taliban leaders in the British theatre of operations in the southern province of Helmand.
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/ 17 December 2007
The full scale of the chaos left behind by British forces in Basra was revealed on Sunday as the city’s police chief described a province in the grip of well-armed militias strong enough to overpower security forces and brutal enough to behead women considered not sufficiently Islamic.
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/ 14 December 2007
Israel must ease restrictions on the Palestinians if efforts led by Tony Blair to boost the Palestinian economy are to be successful, the World Bank and Oxfam said on Thursday. Next Monday Blair, representing the Quartet of Middle East peacemakers, is to chair a conference in Paris of 90 countries and organisations.
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/ 11 December 2007
There is a moment when you can sense the power draining away, when a point of no return has been reached and passed. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is facing that moment now in Britain, as a sense of staleness, sleaze and incompetence overwhelms his government.
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/ 9 December 2007
German Chancellor Angela Merkel directly confronted Robert Mugabe over human rights abuses in front of European and African leaders in Portugal on Saturday, putting the Zimbabwean leader under the spotlight at a summit that has been overshadowed by the despot’s presence.
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/ 8 December 2007
European and African leaders arriving for Saturday’s summit in Lisbon were accused by parliamentarians and human rights groups on both continents of trying to sweep human rights issues under the carpet. Much of the criticism was aimed at the absence of Darfur from the main agenda of the European Union-Africa meeting.
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/ 7 December 2007
His arrival may have been low-key, but veteran Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is likely to steal the spotlight at this weekend’s European Union-Africa summit with his first trip to Europe in more than two years. Usually the subject of a travel ban from the EU, Mugabe touched down in Lisbon late on Thursday.
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/ 7 December 2007
The leaders of Africa and the Europe Union (EU) gathered in Lisbon on Friday for a summit designed to forge a new era in ties, but which is in danger of being overshadowed by the presence of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The two-day summit in the Portuguese capital is set to be dominated by issues such as trade, immigration, the environment and human rights.
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/ 7 December 2007
Zimbabwe and three other African nations provisionally agreed on a regional free trade deal with the European Union (EU) on Thursday. The deal is part of EU efforts to meet a December 31 deadline set by the World Trade Organisation for replacing its trading system with former European colonies.