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/ 20 January 2006
A man was found dead on a New York subway car near the start of the morning rush hour, raising the possibility that his lifeless body rode the train for several hours overnight, authorities said. The body of Eugene Reilly (64), a United States Postal Service employee, was discovered on Thursday.
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/ 20 January 2006
Wilson Pickett, the soul pioneer best known for the fiery hits Mustang Sally and In The Midnight Hour, died of a heart attack in a Reston, Virginia, hospital, his management company said. He was 64. Pickett died on Thursday after having suffered from health problems for the past year, said Chris Tuthill of the management company Talent Source.
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/ 18 January 2006
Americans are getting used to the idea of being led by a female president, with political observers dreaming of a showdown between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Senator Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election. If polls and a television show about a woman president are any indication, Americans appear willing to elect their first woman president.
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/ 11 January 2006
Donald Trump will sponsor a one million-dollar golf showdown next May in the Grenadines, a 100-player event open to both men and women who are not members of the most elite global golf tours. Trump announced the Trump Million Dollar Invitational in new York on Tuesday, unveiling plans for the richest tournament ever staged outside the PGA and LPGA tours.
Having waged a long and largely successful war against its prolific graffiti artists, New York is seeking to disarm the city’s hold-out "spray-painting punks" once and for all. Since January 1, a raft of new restrictions have come into force, including raising from 18 to 21 the age at which it is legal to possess "graffiti instruments".
Motorola will soon begin selling web-enabled cellphones that feature easy access to Google’s search engine by clicking on an icon, the world’s second-largest maker of cellphones said. The company said it will integrate a Google icon on to certain internet-optimised handsets that will be distributed starting in the first quarter of this year.
Wal-Mart Stores is shutting down the system that creates movie recommendations on its shopping website after it linked a Planet of the Apes DVD to films about famous black Americans, including Martin Luther King Jr. Under a ”similar items” section, the DVD set’s page linked shoppers to four films about the lives of King, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and singer Tina Turner.
Reigning Olympic champion Tristan Gale and other members of the United States women’s skeleton team have accused US coach Tim Nardiello of sexual harassment, The New York Times reported on Saturday. Nardiello denied the claims but the US Bobsled and Skeleton Federation has decided that Nardiello will remain as coach through the Torino Winter Olympics in February.
Revellers around the world rang in the New Year with the usual fireworks and fanfare accompanied by calls for peace from the United States and Iraqi presidents. Hundreds of thousands crowded amid tight security into New York’s Times Square and paid special tribute to those who brought relief to the hurricane-devastated city of New Orleans.
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/ 24 December 2005
A Manhattan man’s holiday spirits soared to celestial heights on Friday when a judge gave him permission to change his name to Jesus Christ. Jose Luis Espinal (42) said he was ”happy” and ”grateful” that the judge approved the change, effective immediately.
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/ 23 December 2005
The city’s subways rumbled to life just after midnight on Friday, ending a crippling, three-day strike that brought the nation’s largest public transportation system to a standstill. Faced with mounting fines and the rising wrath of millions of commuters, the city transit union on Thursday sent its members back to work.
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/ 22 December 2005
New York transit worker union leaders could face jail time on Thursday if they don’t call off their strike and a judge makes good his threat, as New Yorkers brave yet a third day of long, cold walks and traffic jams. The Transport Workers’ Union is already being fined -million for each day of the action.
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/ 21 December 2005
New Yorkers faced another bone-chilling commute on Wednesday without their cherished subways and buses as a transit strike entered its second day, leaving both patience and shoe leather wearing thin. With talks still stalled, a judge imposed a huge fine on Tuesday against the Transport Workers’ Union.
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/ 20 December 2005
New York on Tuesday was facing a busy pre-Christmas shopping day with no subway or bus services after transit workers voted to go on strike, an action mayor Michael Bloomberg called ”illegal and morally reprehensible”. More than seven million residents of this sprawling city will have to find alternate means of transportation.
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/ 17 December 2005
Congolese must cast ballots if the Democratic Republic of Congo is to put years of violence behind it, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said through a spokesperson on Friday. ”For the democratic process to succeed, it is essential that the Congolese people play their full part,” Annan’s spokesperson said.
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/ 14 December 2005
New Yorkers Joel Krupnik and Mildred Castellanos have been drawing stares this Christmas by decking the front of their Manhattan mansion not with holly and lights but with a knife-wielding, 1,5m-tall St Nick and a tree full of decapitated Barbie dolls.
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/ 13 December 2005
High-flying internet company Google and 11 other companies were added on Monday to the Nasdaq 100, the Nasdaq Stock Market’s index of the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the market. The Nasdaq 100 is a widely used benchmark for a variety of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.
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/ 13 December 2005
With hat in hand on the eve of his departure, a German prosecutor on Monday delivered more evidence of Syria’s role in slaying a Lebanese political figure and charged that some documentation had been burned and destroyed in Syria. Detlev Mehlis charges that Syria still has not cooperated fully with the United Nations investigation.
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/ 8 December 2005
Substantial progress has been achieved in providing microcredit to the world’s poorest families, those earning less than a dollar a day, according to a report released on Wednesday. The Microcredit Summit Campaign said more than 92-million of these families received loans in 2004, nearly a seven-fold hike from the 13,5-million loan recipients in 1997.
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/ 6 December 2005
King Kong has captivated New Yorkers since he first stepped foot in the city, quickly taking on legendary status with his building-scaling, blonde-loving ways. He is such a legend that that some movie fans occasionally speak of him as if he is more than myth. He is so huge here that some history professors use him to study New York’s past.
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/ 4 December 2005
Time Warner is girding for battle with Carl Icahn as the billionaire corporate raider steps up his offensive against the world’s biggest media-entertainment company. Icahn, a financier who is one of the wealthiest Americans and has a history of hostile takeover moves, controls only about 2,8% of the shares of Time Warner with his partners.
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/ 28 November 2005
The drug maker Merck & Co said on Monday that it will cut about 7 000 jobs, or 11% of its work force, by the end of 2008 and will close or sell five of its 31 manufacturing plants in moves that it says will save up to -billion. It employs just less than 63 000 people.
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/ 24 November 2005
Dinner shared by a group of friends at a well-appointed Greenwich Village apartment features eggplant Parmesan with a salad of mixed greens and avocado dressing. The guests already have snacked on hors d’oeuvres of smoked mozzarella and crackers. Not bad considering the diners find their food by digging through garbage.
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/ 23 November 2005
North Korea’s demand that it be given light-water nuclear reactors before it would open up to atomic inspections and disarmament got a sharp rebuff as the partners in an energy consortium agreed with United States policy and terminated the reactor-building project.
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/ 23 November 2005
Skinned and dissected, muscles, tendons and organs in full view, 22 bodies provided by a Chinese university have become one of the most controversial exhibitions seen in New York in recent years. The bodies have been placed in normal poses inside glass cases for people to gaze upon since Saturday.
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/ 23 November 2005
The International Press Freedom Awards for 2005 went to a Chinese editor still imprisoned in his homeland, a Brazilian reporter who could not travel to New York because he is pinned down by lawsuits, an Uzbek journalist in exile, and a Zimbabwean media lawyer. The laureates honoured by the Committee to Protect Journalists have endured beatings, threats and prison as a consequence of their work.
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/ 18 November 2005
Actor Russell Crowe was scheduled to appear in Manhattan criminal court on Friday, accused of throwing a phone at a hotel concierge in June. If convicted of assault and criminal possession of a weapon, the Oscar winner could lose his right to work in the United States and face seven years in prison. His lawyers have been working to reduce the charges.
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/ 15 November 2005
World oil prices were mixed on Monday, continuing to rally in New York from last week’s four-month low point but falling in London as traders monitored weather patterns in the northern hemisphere. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in December, climbed 16 cents to close at ,69 a barrel.
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/ 15 November 2005
This is what vibrant religious life looks like in one corner of American Judaism: a T-shirt that says ”WWBD?” above a sketch of Barbra Streisand. A man in drag teaching Torah. A website called Mazal Tov Cocktail, a self-described ”encyclopedia of Jewish radical culture” represented by a flaming rag inside a bottle of Manischewitz.
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/ 9 November 2005
Google’s plans for a virtual library of millions of digital books has sparked competing efforts by Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon, whose less ambitious plans could avoid infuriating copyright holders who have attacked Google. <i>Google Print</i>, which scans books and makes their texts available online for keyword searches, was launched this month with what the California company called only "a small fraction" of the 15-million titles it eventually hopes to digitally copy.
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/ 7 November 2005
World-record-holder Paul Tergat of Kenya sprinted to victory ahead of defending champion Hendrick Ramaala of South Africa in the New York men’s marathon on Sunday. The 36-year-old Tergat crossed the line in two hours, nine minutes and 30 seconds, just ahead of Ramaala.
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/ 1 November 2005
The United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday passed a resolution designating January 27 as an annual day to commemorate the Jewish and other victims of the Holocaust. The resolution, first proposed by Australia, Canada, Israel, the Russian Federation and the United States, was co-sponsored by more than 90 countries.