A six-storey apartment building collapsed early on Wednesday in the west coast city of Aalesund after it was hit by a rockslide, injuring 15 people and leaving five others missing, police said. The search for survivors was hampered when a second rockslide hit the crumpled building, which was partly built into a steep hillside.
Long considered the oil capital of Norway, the small south-western town of Stavanger has begun hunting for a new image that will keep the money flowing in even after the oil wells dry up. In recent years, Norway, which once ranked third among oil exporters, has slipped to fifth place.
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/ 24 February 2008
Guarded by motion-detector cameras, security fences and the odd polar bear, a huge cavern has been built in an island off northern Norway to help secure global crop diversity. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a veritable Fort Knox for seeds and aimed at safeguarding genetic heritage for future generations.
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/ 13 December 2007
Favourable winds were set to keep an oil slick 10km long and 5km wide from reaching the Norwegian shore, although rough seas hampered a clean-up operation, energy group StatoilHydro said on Thursday. The accident has stirred debate about the risks of opening up new areas of Norwegian waters for oil and gas exploration.
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/ 10 December 2007
Climate campaigner Al Gore collected the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday and said it was time to stop waging war on the Earth and make peace with the planet. The former United States vice-president shared the 2007 peace prize with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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/ 4 December 2007
Norwegian researchers have discovered a second rare fossil in the Arctic of a pliosaur, a giant reptile described by experts as the ”T rex of the oceans”, the project leader said on Tuesday. ”We think it is a species unknown until now,” said Joern Hurum, of Oslo University’s palaeontology department.
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/ 2 December 2007
A court in southern Norway on Friday dismissed assault claims filed by an 82-year-old woman against a young man, finding instead that she had attacked him first, media reported. The woman had accused a 29-year-old man of causing her a painful injury when he violently twisted her arm during a parking dispute, the daily <i>Toensberg Blad</i> reported.
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/ 28 November 2007
Southern California is sunny, the French Riviera is sunny, but Nasa says the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the Sahara Desert in Niger are the sunniest — and the information could be worth money. The space exploration agency has located the world’s sunniest spots by studying maps compiled by United States and European satellites.
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/ 19 November 2007
Africa is the ”forgotten continent” in the fight against climate change and needs help to cope with projected water shortages and declining crop yields, the United Nations’s top climate change official said on Sunday. Yvo de Boer said that damage projected for Africa by the UN climate panel would justify tougher world action to slow global warming.
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/ 14 November 2007
Africa’s small-scale farmers growing local crops can lead a belated ”green revolution” on the world’s poorest continent, the new head of a -million agricultural project said. Higher output of foods such as cassava and sorghum could help reduce imports of rice, wheat and maize, said Amos Namanga Ngongi.
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/ 17 October 2007
Former United States vice-president Al Gore said that he has no plan to join the US presidential race even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for urging global action to fight climate change. Gore, narrowly beaten by US President George Bush in the 2000 race, said that it was a ”great honour” to win the prestigious award.
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/ 12 October 2007
The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded on Friday to former United States vice-president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was awarded ”for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.
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/ 25 September 2007
Climate change is spurring a ”worldwide economic and industrial restructuring” as more and more of the world’s largest companies seek to confront global warming, an investor survey said on Monday. Even so, some big firms were still doing far too little to identify risks and opportunities from climate change.
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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.
Norwegian researchers are calling for bold, non-hairy humans to bare their arms and be stung by jellyfish — in the name of science. Testing a new sunscreen, aimed at protecting against jellyfish stings, the University of Oslo said it wants volunteers to be burned by jellyfish tentacles on both arms.
The melting of the Earth’s ice and snow is accelerating the effects of global warming and could trigger wider-ranging impacts on people, economies and wildlife, the United Nations warned in a report on Monday. ”If snow and ice continue to melt, this will amplify global warming,” report author Paal Prestrud told a press conference in Norway.
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed as nonsense on Thursday concerns in Moscow that a planned US missile shield in Eastern Europe could pose a strategic threat to Russia. In a further sign of growing tensions between Russia and the West, President Vladimir Putin in Moscow declared a moratorium on a key 1990 European arms treaty.
Northern nations such as Russia or Canada may be celebrating better harvests and less icy winters in coming decades even as rising seas, also caused by global warming, are washing away Pacific island states. A draft United Nations report to be issued in Brussels foresees unequal impacts from warming: tropical nations from Africa to the Pacific, are likely to bear the brunt but those nearer the poles.
Norway, which has twice rejected joining the European Union, is likely to remain outside the bloc for the foreseeable future, a former Norwegian premier said in remarks carried on Friday. The 27-nation bloc is on Sunday due to celebrate its 50th anniversary at a summit in Berlin.
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/ 26 January 2007
Norway stepped up its battle with Apple Computer’s iTunes on Thursday when its consumer ombudsman said the software giant must open access to its music download system by October 1 or face legal action. Last June, Norway’s powerful ombudsman said iTunes violated Norwegian law by forcing consumers to play their downloaded music on Apple’s iPod music player.
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/ 13 October 2006
Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for grassroots efforts to lift millions out of poverty that earned him the nickname ”banker to the poor”. Yunus (66) set up a new kind of bank in 1976 to lend to the very poorest in his native Bangladesh.
Two Norwegians and two Ukrainians working on an oil supply vessel in Nigeria have been kidnapped, the Norwegian government and the ship operators said on Wednesday. ”Two Norwegians and two Ukrainians were kidnapped late on Tuesday while they were on a Norwegian offshore supply vessel,” foreign ministry spokesperson Frode Andersen said.
Legions of giant crabs clawing their way along the bottom of the Barents Sea are proving a godsend to the few fishermen authorised to catch the lucrative crustacean, but some fear the crabs are threatening the sea’s fragile ecosystem. The Kamchatka crab, was introduced into the Barents by the Soviets in the 1960s — about 30 years after a first, failed attempt by Stalin.
Norwegian referee Terje Hauge, who was criticized for sending off Arsenal goalkeeper Jens Lehmann after just 18 minutes against Barcelona in Wednesday night’s Champions League final, said he may have blown the whistle too early, a Norwegian newspaper reported on Thursday.
Four times heavier than the Titanic and with decks big enough for 25 football pitches, the Freedom of the Seas is the world’s biggest cruiseliner, and yet as easy to manoeuvre as a zippy sports car, its captain insists. The vessel can accommodate 4 375 passengers and 1 365 crew.
Canada’s embassy in Norway is to present five tonnes of maple syrup to Norway’s skiing-team trainer, Bjoernar Haakensmoen, in recognition of his help during the Winter Olympics, the embassy said on Monday. By giving one of his ski poles to Canadian Sara Renner, Haakensmoen allowed Canada to take silver in the women’s cross-country.
Many a beer lover may dream of having free beer on tap at home. That dream came true over the weekend for Haldis Gundersen of the western Norwegian city of Oslo, reports said on Monday. ”I thought I was in heaven,” Gundersen told the online edition of Verdens Gang.
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/ 23 November 2005
A Norwegian church that included the popular Harry Potter character as a theme in the worship service has raised some questions among Norwegian priests, reports said on Wednesday. The church was packed and many of the congregation had dressed up as characters in the Harry Potter films, newspaper Vart Land said.
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/ 20 November 2005
It takes guts to stare your food in the eyes and then swallow them, but once Norwegians are let loose on a smoked sheep’s head, they let nothing go to waste, except the bare bones of the skull. In Voss, a tiny town in the mountains near the south-west Norwegian fjords, people have always eaten the ”smalahove”, which means ”sheep’s head” in the local dialect.
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/ 3 November 2005
Potty training is difficult enough for any toddler, but one Norwegian youngster has suffered a particularly dramatic reverse after a carnivorous lizard emerged from the family toilet as he used it. The boy’s mother discovered the 75cm teju lizard as she helped her three-year-old use the toilet.
The Norwegian who became a hacker hero for developing software to crack DVD encryption has posted a program to break the lock on Google’s brand-new video viewer. Jon Lech Johansen’s latest program was posted on his ”So sue me” website on Tuesday. That was just one day after Google launched free software allowing users to watch videos.
More cellphones are ringing in Norway than there are people to answer them, as subscriptions soar, officials figures showed on Monday. And the Norwegians are not the only cellphone enthusiasts. On the same day, Lithuania also reported that the number of cellphone subscribers surpassed the population of the Baltic country.