Tokyo has a history of cancelled Olympics – but a different type of war caused it to cancel in 1940
Many Twitter users expressed anger that a US leader had blamed his own country for the rift between the two nations
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/ 12 January 2012
A new museum will add to the foundation’s growing stable of contemporary art spaces around the world.
Cape Town has been named World Design Capital for 2014, at the International Design Congress in Taipei, but there are dissenting voices back home.
The city is renowned for its aesthetic beauty and its gifted designers — but their work doesn’t come cheap. <em>Norman Miller</em> reports.
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/ 10 October 2008
Former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his work on conflict resolution.
As the internet goes mobile and companies such as Apple and Google find cool ways to embrace the trend, mobile market leader Nokia is rewriting its product development rulebook. Instead of working in secrecy and isolation, it wants to start sharing.
A Finnish library-goer apparently thought ”better late than never” and quietly returned a book on loan for more than 100 years to a library in Vantaa, Finland. The library had lost track of the loan but welcomed back to its collections the copy of a 1902 volume of Vartija, a religious monthly periodical.
Nokia on Friday announced a deal to sell handsets worth a total â,¬2-billion to China Postel during 2008, in the company’s largest market. The world’s number one cellphone maker said the deal includes the development of technological infrastructure and marketing with China Postel, with which it has worked since 1998.
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/ 12 February 2008
Finnish cellphone giant Nokia said on Tuesday it had reached an agreement with Google to incorporate the Google search engine in its handsets. In a first stage, the United States firm’s search technology will be available in a limited number of countries on Nokia’s high-end N96 and N78 models, among others.
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/ 11 February 2008
The United Nations’s top emergency relief official said on Monday that as many as 600 000 people had been displaced following violence sparked by Kenya’s disputed elections. ”We estimate that 300 000 people were displaced and are now in camps,” John Holmes said, adding: ”There are probably as many displaced who are not in camps.”
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/ 29 January 2008
A hospital patient in Finland found a mouse head among the steamed vegetables on his plate. ”Understandably, he lost his appetite,” said Sakari Kela, chief administrator at the Northern Karelia Central Hospital. The health of the patient in Joensuu, eastern Finland, had not been compromised by the dead rodent, Kela said on Saturday.
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/ 26 November 2007
A Finnish court ordered Santa Park in the north of the country to pay compensation to three of the underground amusement park’s former elves for replacing them with temporary workers. The park has been ordered to pay the employees €5 600 each in damages.
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/ 15 November 2007
Finns formed long lines outside the country’s rare liquor shops that remained open on Thursday after a strike by employees of state-owned monopoly distributor Alko. The company said that only about 40 out of 336 outlets were expected to be open during the strike over employment conditions that was to last until Saturday.
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/ 8 November 2007
Finland’s gun laws are likely to attract criticism after an 18-year-old gunman shot dead seven children and a school principal on Wednesday. The shooter turned the gun on himself and died in hospital. About 56 of every 100 Finns own a gun, according to a study by the Graduate Institute of International Studies.
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/ 24 October 2007
When George Linardos was ordered to clear his diary to help dream up new business for Nokia, he imagined six weeks brainstorming on the terrace of a five-star hotel in the Caribbean. What he got was a pot of porridge every morning at a Spartan hotel hours from Finnish capital Helsinki, with forests and snow all around.
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/ 13 September 2007
The world’s largest cellphone maker, Nokia, said on Thursday it will join rivals — including Samsung and Sony Ericsson — to produce a fast flash memory card with high capacity to ease and speed up downloads for handset users. The technology is expected to be ready in 2009.
A Finnish court ruled against a 15-year-old student in a libel case on Friday after he posted a clip of his teacher on YouTube, ordering the youth to pay €800 (about R7 900) in damages and a €90 (R890) fine. The student had filmed his teacher singing at a school party last May.
Finns stayed invincible to keep their world champion titles in male and female sauna sitting, beating Russian, American, German and Turkish competitors on their home ground, organisers said on Monday. Timo Kaukonen won the male championship for the third year in a row, staying in a sauna heated to 110 degrees Celsius for 12 minutes and 26 seconds.
Low-cut dresses and high-cut skirts, pink glitter drag queens, swarthy Latin singers and lots of big hair: after last year’s unexpected victory by monster-rock group Lordi, controversy and fantasy return to the Eurovision song contest this weekend — but have no doubt about it, glamour is back on centre stage.
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/ 5 December 2006
The world’s richest 2% of adults own more than half of global household wealth, while half the world’s population own only 1%, a United Nations report published on Tuesday showed. The report, entitled The World Distribution of Household Wealth, found that assets of  200 or more placed a household in the top half of world wealth distribution in 2000.
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/ 19 November 2006
The European Union on Saturday hailed progress made at a worldwide conference on climate change in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. ”The EU welcomes the solid progress made at the United Nations climate change conference which ended [Friday] in Nairobi,” the bloc’s current Finnish Presidency said in a statement.
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/ 6 November 2006
A Finnish mathematician on Monday claimed he had created the world’s hardest sudoku puzzle, a brain-teaser that required three months’ work and a billion combinations to produce. ”AI Escargot is the most difficult sudoku puzzle known so far,” the puzzle’s 37-year-old creator and applied mathematician Arto Inkala said.
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/ 1 November 2006
More than a decade after world leaders pledged to avert ”dangerous” climate change, a report card on their efforts so far might read: ”Must try harder”. Rising industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, acrimony between Washington and many of its allies over policy and a report this week that the world economy risks a 1930s-style Depression by failing to act are among reasons for gloom.
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/ 24 October 2006
Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets’ worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday. It also said in a two-yearly report that populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003.
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/ 17 October 2005
Beneath the civilised veneer of Helsinki’s broad boulevards lies a throbbing night scene fuelled by tar-coloured liquorice schnapps, lethally sweet cider and Lapin Kulta beer. Perhaps nowhere illustrates this better than Hevimesta, whose sober wooden doorway in the ministry of agriculture building gives away nothing by day.
With only six gold medals, five less than the Paris haul in 2003, Africa’s poor showing at the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) world championships in Helsinki, Finland, has incensed sports administrators and athletes alike.
”Old stars fade, new stars light up the sky,” was how 110m hurdler Allen Johnson assessed athletics ahead of the world championships, and he couldn’t have been more correct. If the Helsinki championships were anything to go by, then the old guard has been stood down for the new kids on the block.
On a day made for doubles, Tirunesh Dibaba clinched an unprecedented long-distance sweep and sprinter Lauryn Williams added a second gold by helping the United States win the 400m relay on Saturday at the World Athletics Championships. The 19-year-old Dibaba successfully defended her title in the 5Â 000m race.
If Thursday was the United States’s day, then Friday was definitely Russia’s, as led by extraordinary pole-vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva they won three titles at the World Athletics Championships. The 23-year-old broke her own world record for the ninth time this year — vaulting 5,01m.
Bahrain’s newly crowned 1Â 500m world champion Rashid Ramzi began his quest for a golden double with an easy win in his 800m first-round heat at the World Athletics Championships in Montreal on Thursday. Mbulaeni Mulaudzi of South Africa struggled to get the third automatic qualifying spot.
After a near-perfect day for the United States team at the World Athletics Championships, it’s little wonder Justin Gatlin and the sprinters are dreaming of a 1-2-3-4 sweep in Thursday’s 200m. Gatlin wants to make sure his name comes up first, though.