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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.
Israeli officials in Jerusalem are to deploy more than 10 000 police officers in a vast security operation ahead of the arrival this week of George Bush, the first United States president to visit in a decade. Graffiti are being cleaned off walls, road markings are being repainted and hundreds of American flags are being put up across the city.
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/ 30 December 2007
Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden warned Sunni Muslims in Iraq not to take up arms against the terror network and promised the "liberation of Palestine" in a new online message. In the 56-minute tape released late on Saturday, the Western world’s most wanted man also accused the United States of seeking to control the region through the Iraqi government.
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/ 29 November 2007
Israeli police said on Thursday there was insufficient evidence to indict Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in a graft case, a major boost for the premier as he returned home from a United Sates peace conference. ”There is insufficient evidence to indict Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the Bank Leumi case,” police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld said.
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/ 24 November 2007
Lebanon edged closer to chaos on Friday when President Emile Lahoud ordered the army to take charge of security after political rivalries blocked the election of his successor hours before his term expired. The pro-Syrian head of state said the country risked descending into a state of emergency.
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/ 15 November 2007
Israel is quietly preparing for the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran despite public pledges to deny its arch-foe the means to pose an ”existential threat”, Israeli political and defence sources said on Thursday. Israel predicts that Iran’s nuclear programme could produce warheads by 2009.
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/ 25 October 2007
Ratcheting up the pressure on Tehran, the United States on Thursday designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a proliferater of weapons of mass destruction and its elite Qods force a supporter of terrorism. In total, Washington slapped sanctions on more than 20 Iranian companies, major banks and individuals as well as the Defence Ministry.
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/ 15 October 2007
Lebanon said on Monday it had arrested a gang of foreigners who were plotting attacks on United Nations peacekeepers, four months after six troops were killed in a bombing against a Spanish contingent. ”The Lebanese army’s secret service arrested a network of non-Lebanese terrorists,” the army said.
Iran’s president accused Israel on Friday of using the Holocaust as a pretext for ”genocide” against Palestinians. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who outraged the West in 2005 by calling Israel a ”tumour” to be wiped off the map, said the truth should be told about World War II and the Holocaust.
After nearly a month of official silence, Israel confirmed on Tuesday that its air force carried out a strike inside Syrian territory on September 6. Israel had until now refused to confirm or deny that any air strike had taken place, though the incident was publicly confirmed by Syrian and Western officials.
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/ 27 September 2007
Militants are exploiting weak law enforcement in West Africa to raise funds from rackets ranging from people smuggling to drug trafficking and even fake Viagra, experts said. In the past two years, South American cartels have switched their trafficking routes into Europe to funnel drugs via lawless swathes of war-scarred West Africa.
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/ 20 September 2007
Lebanon mourned on Thursday an anti-Syrian member of Parliament whose assassination plunged the country deeper into crisis and threatened to derail efforts to elect a new president. Banks, schools and government offices closed a day after a car bomb killed Christian Phalange Party parliamentarian Antoine Ghanem.
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/ 18 September 2007
Chinese and Russian spies are stalking the United States at levels close to those seen during the tense covert espionage duels of the Cold War, the top US intelligence officer warned on Tuesday. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell was to raise the spectre of a new era of clandestine intelligence wars during a House of Representatives hearing on a contentious new law on wiretapping.
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/ 17 September 2007
Israel has enforced a news blackout on what may be its air force’s most audacious raid since its jets destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in 1981. The Israeli government has made no comment about the raid on what is believed to be a nuclear installation in Syria.
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/ 11 September 2007
Norway will reduce its direct aid to Ethiopia by about one-third after Addis Ababa expelled six Norwegian diplomats, Development Aid Minister Erik Solheim said on Tuesday, though he said it was for purely logistical reasons. ”We want to have a good relationship with Ethiopia,” Solheim told foreign correspondents in Oslo.
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/ 6 September 2007
Syria accused Israel on Thursday of bombing its territory and warned it could respond, but Israel Radio carried a denial there had been an air strike. The official Syrian news agency said there were no casualties or damage and that Syrian air defences fired on the incoming planes shortly after midnight.