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/ 8 February 2008

Uncertain times for China

When Sun Jun ignited a cacophony of fireworks recently, he was letting off steam as much as ushering in the Year of the Rat in the Chinese lunar calendar. For the Beijing taxi driver, two days’ holiday during the spring festival is a rare break in a work schedule that otherwise has him on the road almost every day of the year.

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/ 19 March 2007

China plans to build super-jumbo

China plans to produce its own large commercial jet by 2020 to challenge the dominance of Airbus and Boeing in the world’s fastest-growing aircraft market. Beijing has accelerated the development of a home-grown passenger aircraft to compete for the billions of dollars it is spending on foreign planes.

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/ 29 January 2007

Palace putsch for Starbucks?

One of the most incongruous sights of the globalised age — the Starbucks coffee shop inside Beijing’s Forbidden City — could soon be a thing of the past after a furious online campaign. In response to this demonstration of "netizen” power, the palace’s guardians have announced plans to review the presence of the coffee shop.

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/ 20 November 2006

Queen of the islands becomes queen of green

Put yourself in the shoes of Imelda Marcos. At the height of your power you are the wife of a president, one of the 10 richest women in the world, intimate with the world’s dictators and the owner of arguably the biggest private collection of art — and footwear — on the planet. Then try to squeeze into those sling-backs again today.

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/ 10 November 2006

Burma: glittering junta wedding sparks outrage

Strings of diamonds, cascades of champagne and tens of millions of dollars worth of gifts would be con-sidered ostentatious at any wedding. But in Burma, one of the poorest countries in Asia, the luxury on display in a video of the wedding laid on by the head of the junta, General Than Shwe, for his daughter, has left people up in arms.

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/ 6 January 2006

Nasa to turn moon around

Nasa is to rotate the moon through 180°. “We are doing this for entirely scientific reasons,” said Nasa senior director, Dr Lytton J Vasselberg, “but there will be certain aesthetic advantages as well.” Scheduled to begin in June 2007, a series of explosions will slowly rotate the lunar planet over a series of years.

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/ 6 January 2006

Apple of his father’s swollen eye

"Soccer runs in our family’s veins," says proud dad Ozzie Liebestein. And sometimes outside his family’s veins, too, by the looks of things: five minutes into the interview the nasty gash to his forehead is still oozing. Most fathers might have had a few sharp words to say to their sons had they too been felled by a roundhouse kick to the mandible, but Ozzie will hear none of it.

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/ 6 January 2006

International space station hijacked

The International Space Station (ISS) is missing and nobody is terribly sure where it has gone. In an extraordinary press conference at Cape Canaveral this week, Nasa admitted that the last communication from the two astronauts on board was more than 48 hours ago and was said to be: “Hey, what’s going on? You guys didn’t say you were sending a shuttle.”

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/ 6 January 2006

Mbeki in surprise SA visit

In an unexpected move that caught political commentators on the back foot, President Thabo Mbeki made a surprise visit to South Africa last Wednesday. His unannounced arrival was leaked to <i>Not the Mail & Guardian</i> by a part-time hangar-sweeper at the South African Air Force base at Swartkops, outside Tshwane.