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/ 10 October 2003
Syria’s youthful president sounded resolute and defiant this week in his first public comment on the Israeli air raid that struck deep into his country’s territory. ”We can, with full confidence, say that what happened will only make Syria’s role more effective and influential,”’ Bashar al-Assad told the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat.
Oil prices trickled down on Thursday after a planned general strike by Nigerian workers, which could have affected the country’s oil industry, was called off at the last moment. The price of reference Brent North Sea crude oil for November delivery fell 19 cents to ,54 per barrel in early deals.
Amnesty and Oxfam have joined with the International Action Network on Small Arms to campaign for a treaty to stop arms being exported to destinations where thay are likely to be used to commit human rights abuses. The groups are seeking the adoption of such a treaty by 2006.
A former senior British diplomat on Thursday broke the traditional taboo on discussing British intelligence (MI6) operations to launch a broadside against the United Kingdom intelligence agencies’ failures in the wake of the Hutton inquiry into the death of the British weapons expert Dr David Kelly.
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/ 26 September 2003
British rock singer Robert Palmer, best known for his Eighties hits Addicted to Love and Simply Irresistible, died on Friday in Paris of a heart attack. He was 54. Born Alan Palmer, the singer was a member of several British rock bands before he achieved solo fame.
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/ 24 September 2003
Microsoft is shutting down internet chat services in most of its markets around the world and limiting the service in the United States to help reduce criminal solicitations of children through online chat discussions. The changes will take effect on October 14, Microsoft has said in an announcement from Europe.
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/ 24 September 2003
The inquiry into the suicide of British government weapons expert David Kelly is wrapping up 22 days of oral evidence before the senior jurist who is heading it sits down to write up his findings. Kelly’s death plunged Prime Minister Tony Blair into the worst crisis of his six years in office.
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/ 21 September 2003
Ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein has been in secret negotiations with US forces in Iraq for the past nine days, a British tabloid newspaper has claimed. Saddam is reportedly demanding safe passage to Belarus in exchange for information on weapons of mass destruction and bank accounts.
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/ 18 September 2003
Former United Nations arms inspector Hans Blix has said that the war on Iraq was not justified and that Washington and London ”over-interpreted” intelligence data, while a new message attributed to ousted president Saddam Hussein urged Iraqis to fight United States occupying forces.
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/ 18 September 2003
Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon has told an audience in London that he would oppose the Electoral Laws Amendment Bill in its current form as it disenfranchised South Africans abroad. He added that in 1994 South Africa made a special effort to enable overseas citizens to vote.
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/ 12 September 2003
A veteran of unusual protests rolled a nut to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s doorstep with his nose on Friday, completing a 11,2km journey across London aimed at highlighting the issue of student debt. His journey took 11 days.
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/ 10 September 2003
At his eve-of-war press conference back in March, President George W Bush cast Iraq as providing ”training and safe haven to terrorists who would willingly use weapons of mass destruction against America and other peace-loving countries”. The irony is that, at the time, this was not true. But it is now.
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/ 8 September 2003
French anti-globalisation activist Jose Bove has said he supports the agricultural subsidies doled out in wealthy Western countries, saying states had the right to protect their farmers, but insisted poor nations still needed protection from European and United States exports.
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/ 8 September 2003
The leader of Britain’s main opposition Conservative Party has said that Prime Minister Tony Blair should resign if an inquiry links him to the treatment of weapons adviser David Kelly, who apparently committed suicide after being caught up in a political row.
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/ 5 September 2003
The leading theorist of the big lie was Adolf Hitler. ”The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. Tony Blair is not in this league of mendacity, and I don’t suppose that when he set up the Lord James Hutton inquiry he had in mind for it a role as the great deceiver.
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/ 4 September 2003
Early in March intelligence agents searching the western deserts of Pakistan thought they had finally tracked down the world’s most wanted man. They were wrong. And they are still in the dark as to the whereabouts of Al-Qaeda’s leader, now believed to be in northern Pakistan guarded by a ring of tribesmen.
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/ 3 September 2003
Colin Humphreys of Cambridge University has the 21st-century equivalent of the philosopher’s stone. He is working with something that sounds like an alchemist’s dream: a substance that could turn base metal into gold. It could transmit light without wasting energy as heat and make computers 10 000 times faster.
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/ 1 September 2003
An eleventh-hour deal to provide cut-price drugs for the world’s poorest people was being finalised in Geneva last week in an effort to save next month’s trade summit in Cancun, Mexico, from collapse.
Alastair Campbell has announced he is to leave his Downing Street job in a shock move mid-way through the Hutton inquiry.
More than half of Britons believe British Prime Minister Tony Blair cannot be trusted, according to a poll published a day after he dismissed claims of misleading the country over the war in Iraq.
Tony Blair’s hopes of leading Britain into the single currency before the next general election are in ruins after Labour loyalists admitted this week that Downing Street’s battle with the BBC has ”derailed” the pro-euro campaign.
The notoriously crowded and sweaty basement club where the Beatles played
some of their first gigs is about to become a global brand, writes Helen Carter in London, and will soon be opening as far afield as Australia, Spain and Brazil.
British health service officials were forced to back away from offering a black woman undergoing a foot amputation a white artificial foot as a cheaper option than one in her own skin colour, after media reports publicised the case on Monday.
Old hat JM Coetzee, Barbara Trapido and Damon Galgut are among some local nominees on the esteemed Booker Prize longlist of 23 novels this year, writes John Ezard in London.
The misuse of the apostrophe and the appropriate use of the hyphen — questions that have plagued teachers of English and editors for generations — could soon be at an end.
Libya has agreed to pay ,7-billion in compensation to families of victims of the Lockerbie bombing, family lawyers said on Thursday.
Fifty-eight years later, using recently discovered large-scale Japanese maps, sophisticated computer models and new radiation measurements, scientists have completed a painstaking reconstruction of events in Hiroshima.
Until recently I was under the impression that marriage was just a disgracefully patriarchal cattle market. But then my friend Dave asked me to be best man at his wedding. Undeniably, there are problems inherent in the idea of a female best man.
The BBC journalist who reported that Britain exaggerated the case for war in Iraq was set to testify on Tuesday before a judicial inquiry into the apparent suicide of the government scientist allegedly behind the claims.
British government weapons adviser David Kelly was a superb scientist whose work helped uncover Saddam Hussein’s secret germ warfare program, said a witness at a judicial inquiry on Monday into Kelly’s suicide.
Europeans sweating through an abnormally hot August faced little immediate prospect of relief on Monday after a weekend of record-setting temperatures, many deaths and runaway fires.
Nevirapine is generally safe and well tolerated by children, reports a United Kingdom paper.