China warned of a ”life and death” struggle with the Dalai Lama’s supporters today, as it sought to underscore its control of Tibet by claiming that over 100 rioters had surrendered to police. Officials had promised ”leniency” for anyone who handed themselves in before midnight on Monday, and warned that others would face harsh punishment.
The Dalai Lama said on Tuesday he will stand down if violence in Tibet spirals out of control, after the Chinese accused him of masterminding the unrest. ”If things become out of control then my only option is to completely resign,” the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, told a news conference.
Conservatives won a majority in Iran’s parliamentary vote, state television said on Sunday, but the new assembly may still give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a tougher time ahead of next year’s presidential election. Western powers embroiled in a deepening stand-off with Tehran over its disputed nuclear plans condemned Friday’s election as unfair.
A play about the United States activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed at the age of 23 by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza, will be performed for the first time in Israel on Sunday, on the fifth anniversary of her death. The single-actor play My Name Is Rachel Corrie will first be performed in Arabic in Haifa, northern Israel.
Iran began counting votes on Saturday that are likely to keep conservatives in control of Parliament after many opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were blocked from standing in the election. The United States, at loggerheads with Iran over its nuclear programme, said any result was ”cooked”.
China is struggling to prevent burgeoning protests in Tibet from overshadowing its Olympic preparations amid reports that monks have gone on hunger strike after the region’s biggest demonstrations in almost 20 years. Thousands of armed police have surrounded monasteries outside Lhasa, following marches against Chinese rule this week.
Robert Mugabe’s iron grip on his ruling Zanu-PF party is being broken ahead of this month’s presidential election as senior party figures throw their weight behind an unprecedented challenge to Zimbabwe’s president from his former finance minister, Simba Makoni.
Erai Maggi does not look like a villain who is destroying the planet; nor does he look like a hero who is saving the world’s poor. Wearing jeans and work boots, he can be found on a typical day driving a battered Fiat car on one of his farms south of the Amazon rainforest.
The Kremlin is planning to falsify the results of Sunday’s presidential election by compelling millions of public-sector workers to vote and by fraudulently boosting the official turnout, a media report said. Governors, regional officials and even headteachers have been instructed to deliver a landslide majority for Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister.
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/ 26 February 2008
”I am alone next to the pool at Le Prince Maurice Hotel in Mauritius. In contrast, all the people around me are paired off. Every coupling is a story pitted with conflict, resolution, stalemates, passions, misunderstandings, wars and truces. A pity, then, how little hope they have of picking up a good modern novel and finding some reflection of, or consolation for, or explication of, their private experiences,” writes Tim Lott.
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/ 23 February 2008
It has taken two decades to plan, 20 000 workers to build and cost an unprecedented £4,3-billion. But until now, the doors to the retail space at Terminal 5, at London’s Heathrow airport, which opens next month, have been firmly closed to the media, amid criticisms that the terminal is destined to be little more than a glorified shopping mall.
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/ 21 February 2008
The British media are under the spotlight, accused of encouraging a flurry of apparent suicides by impressionable teenagers in and around the small town of Bridgend in the south Wales valleys. In little more than a year, 17 young people have been found dead, 16 of them hanged.
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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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/ 16 February 2008
Two-thirds of the Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan can be persuaded to abandon violence, according to a British aid worker expelled from the country for opening talks with some of those allied to the militant group. Michael Semple said he was confident that most Taliban-linked insurgents could be absorbed into Afghanistan’s reconciliation process.
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/ 26 January 2008
Jérôme Kerviel, a shy and introverted young city trader, lived on a tree-lined street in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the wealthy Paris suburb dubbed Sarkozyland in honour of its famous political son. Its yuppies live by Nicolas Sarkozy’s mantra ”work more to earn more”.
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/ 24 January 2008
The admission by French bank Société Générale on Thursday that a single trader had defrauded it of €4,9-billion ($7,15-billion) is just the latest example of how a rogue operator can blow a huge chunk of a company’s assets sky high. What rogue bankers have in common is that they are experts in making money.
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/ 24 January 2008
At first sight, Salon Fabulous doesn’t quite live up to its name. A trailer in a car park in a neighbourhood of dilapidated houses and rusting cars on the outskirts of Columbia, the state capital of South Carolina, it doesn’t hold out much promise of transformation.
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/ 22 January 2008
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Tuesday heightened the rancour of their Monday debate by attacking each other’s record and style, bringing what has become a mean-spirited and negative campaign to a new low. At a hastily arranged press conference in Washington, Clinton accused Obama of desperation.
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/ 11 January 2008
Edmund Hillary, the beekeeper from Auckland who conquered Mount Everest and went on to become one of the greatest adventurers of the 20th century, has died at the age of 88. Hillary, who reached the peak of Everest in 1953, only admitted being the first man to reach the top of the world’s highest mountain after the death of his climbing companion, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, in 1986.
Benazir Bhutto had planned to brief visiting American politicians about an alleged poll-rigging plot orchestrated by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies on the day she was killed, senior officials of her party said on Monday. Bhutto had obtained details of an Islamabad safe house run by the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency from where it intended to manipulate the poll.
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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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/ 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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/ 22 December 2007
The secretive oil company Gunvor has broken its silence over its alleged links with Vladimir Putin, denying that the Russian President was the company’s ”beneficiary” owner. Gunvor’s CEO said it was ”plain wrong” to suggest the company had benefited from its alleged close connections with the Kremlin.
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/ 20 December 2007
An unprecedented battle is taking place inside the Kremlin in advance of Vladimir Putin’s departure from office, with claims that the president presides over a secret multibillion-dollar fortune. Rival clans inside the Kremlin are embroiled in a struggle for the control of assets as Putin prepares to transfer power to his hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev.
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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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/ 4 December 2007
The wife of a British man who disappeared more than five years ago but then turned up alive at the weekend has herself gone missing, media reports said on Tuesday. John Darwin (57), who was thought to have died in a canoeing accident, walked in to a London police station and declared he was a missing person, but had no memory of where he had been.
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/ 1 December 2007
The man who devised the Bush administration’s Iraq troop surge has urged the United States to consider sending elite troops to Pakistan to seize its nuclear weapons if the country descends into chaos. In a series of scenarios drawn up for Pakistan, Frederick Kagan has called for the White House to consider various options for an unstable Pakistan.
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/ 30 November 2007
The discovery was announced two years ago amid fanfare and to the astonishment of the art world: a dusty batch of 32 previously unknown Jackson Pollocks had been found in a Long Island storage locker dating from the important period of his early drip paintings, 1946 to 1949.
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/ 22 November 2007
Britain’s newspapers savaged Steve McClaren on Thursday after the England manager failed to guide his team to the 2008 European Championships. McClaren was expected to be sacked within hours of going to print as the national press put the boot into the Yorkshireman following Wednesday’s 3-2 defeat to Croatia.
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/ 20 November 2007
President Thabo Mbeki’s office said an investigation into the arms deal had already found no wrongdoing on the part of government. This followed a media report based on an addendum to Mbeki’s online letter in his capacity as president of the African National Congress on November 16.
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/ 19 November 2007
In the fevered talk these days about religion and secularism, there is little room for the thing Africans like me most fear: religious or cultural rationalism. Outside of tiny labs the general ignorance about science, even among people with good educations, is very high. I remember a famous Afrikaans rugby player, a medical doctor, saying in the 1990s that science had determined that black people could not swim — something to do with muscles and heavy bones.
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/ 13 November 2007
The death penalty is a violation of fundamental human rights, and it should be abolished around the world, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday, ahead of a vote on a draft resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for a moratorium on executions.