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/ 26 January 2008
Women may be smashing glass ceilings on Wall Street, but a walk down the corridors of the World Economic Forum would have you fooled. Organisers say female delegates make up 17% of the hundreds of policymakers and business leaders that gathered in Davos this week — less than one in five.
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/ 25 January 2008
Jacob Zuma said on Thursday that United States and European interference was hindering efforts to reconcile Zimbabwe’s opposition with President Robert Mugabe’s government. ”The US and Europeans tell us what we need to do and tell Mugabe,” Zuma told reporters at the gathering of leaders in Davos.
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/ 24 January 2008
Biofuels made from plants and waste will prove an increasingly efficient and cheap substitute for oil in many areas over the coming five years, industry analysts said. As long as crude sells at prices towards $100 per barrel, there will be strong demand for cheaper biofuels.
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/ 24 January 2008
The United States and other countries must not demonise sovereign wealth funds as they come to the aid of troubled United States banks, some of the world’s biggest state-run investors said on Thursday. A top US official denied the United States feared government-run investment funds, many of them based in Asia, the Gulf and Russia.
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/ 24 January 2008
Climate change is occurring far more rapidly than even the worst predictions of the United Nations Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore said on Thursday. Recent evidence shows "the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than … projections had warned us", he said.
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/ 23 January 2008
Rudolph R Spruengli, heir to a Swiss chocolate empire and head of the world-renowned Lindt & Spruengli business for more than two decades, has died at the age of 88, his company said. Spruengli was born into the Lindt & Spruengli chocolate dynasty in 1920 and spent his entire working life with the family firm.
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/ 23 January 2008
The annual Davos gathering of the world’s political and business elite opened on Wednesday with the fragile state of the world economy and stock-market turmoil casting a pall over the glitzy get-together. In recent years the annual meeting in the Swiss ski resort has been held against a backdrop of bumper corporate profits, strong economic growth and tame inflation.
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/ 22 January 2008
A private firm funded by Google launched its web-based DNA test in Europe on Tuesday, hoping to build on a successful start in the United States. Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki, co-founders of 23andMe, will showcase their service at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
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/ 18 January 2008
Former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan will go to Kenya on Tuesday to help mediate in the country’s violent political crisis, the UN said on Friday. A statement said that Annan, who had called off a planned trip last Tuesday after contracting flu, ”is making a good recovery”.
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/ 16 January 2008
Forget retail therapy for some relief from that winter cold — a study by Swiss scientists revealed on Wednesday that the flu virus can nestle and survive on banknotes for more than two weeks. Scientists from Geneva’s University Hospital were asked by a Swiss bank to carry out the study.
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/ 15 January 2008
The United Nations on Tuesday warned of the worsening situation in flood-affected parts of Southern Africa as more rain was expected in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi over the next 24 hours. In Geneva, the UN Children’s Fund launched an emergency appeal for almost ,5-million for Malawi, where more than a million people face food shortages.
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/ 14 January 2008
Army conscripts used to be a common sight in Andermatt, practising parallel turns or perfecting climbing techniques in case they were needed to defend Switzerland’s mountain heart. These days it is mainly local skiers schussing down the surrounding slopes and the town is better known for two things: the foil that covers a glacier to stop it melting in summer and a giant new luxury holiday resort.
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/ 11 January 2008
It was the flip-open tool of the 20th century, but the Swiss Army Knife fell out of favour as cellphones and MP3 players vied for pocket space. Now from their base in what is popularly known as Swiss Army Knife Valley in central Switzerland, its makers are fighting back with a range of products carrying the iconic brand as well as the creation of a flagship store in New York.
Global economic growth is "robust" but inflation risks remain as markets absorb the impact of the United States subprime crisis and higher food prices, European Central Bank (ECB) chief Jean-Claude Trichet said on Monday. "Food is a very big problem" stoking inflationary pressures, Trichet said.
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/ 18 December 2007
More than 1 400 would-be migrants, mostly Somalis and Ethiopians, have drowned off Yemen this year trying to cross the Gulf of Aden on rickety boats run by brutal smugglers. About 28 300 people leaving northern Somalia, mainly Somalis and Ethiopians, have made it to Yemen’s shores on 300 boats this year.
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/ 12 December 2007
The airline industry body IATA slashed its forecast for industry profits in 2008 on Wednesday, warning that the spiralling cost of fuel and the impact of the credit crunch would reverse expected growth. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) reduced its forecast for 2008 industry profits by one third to -billion.
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/ 12 December 2007
The fate of the United Nations human rights investigator for Sudan, who has reported war crimes in Darfur, hangs in the balance this week as African and Islamic countries seek to end her mandate. African and Islamic countries told the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday that conditions in Darfur had improved.
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/ 4 December 2007
The United Nations refugee agency on Tuesday warned that renewed fighting between government troops and rebels in eastern Chad has limited its access to refugee camps amid a heightened sense of insecurity. The fighting has not sparked any exodus but has ratcheted up tensions and worries among vulnerable sections of society, the UN said.
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/ 22 November 2007
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday that 164 people have died from Rift Valley Fever in Sudan, more than half as many again as the latest figure given by the Sudanese government. The WHO called on local media, community and religious leaders to ensure people know what measures to take to reduce the risk of infection.
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/ 21 November 2007
More than three-quarters of Aids-related deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa — and South Africa is now officially the country with the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. The South African government currently estimates about 5,5-million of the country’s 48-million people are living with the disease.
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/ 17 November 2007
Sudan added to the international row over Zoe’s Ark on Friday, accusing Paris of having furnished visas to the French charity to fly 103 children out of Chad, before the Chadian authorities intervened. Sudan’s humanitarian aid commissioner Mohamed Abdel Rahman Hassabo also accused the United Nations agencies working in the region
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/ 16 November 2007
A new World Trade Organisation (WTO) accord could improve access to clean-energy tools in poorer countries, but any deal making it easier to ship cargo internationally would also carry a heavy carbon footprint. Environmental economists are uncertain about the relative merits of the WTO’s Doha round.
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/ 2 November 2007
Aid workers are planning to travel to Chad’s western border with Sudan to try to determine the exact background of 103 children at the centre of a child abduction row, the United Nations Children’s Fund said on Friday. The group is aiming to meet village and community leaders around the Chadian towns of Adre and Tine.
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/ 30 October 2007
Brazil, the only bidding country, were named as the host nation of the 2014 Soccer World Cup finals by Fifa, world soccer’s governing body, on Tuesday. Brazil, who have won the World Cup a record five times and are the only country to have played in all 18 World Cup finals tournaments, last staged the event in 1950.
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/ 30 October 2007
About 36 000 Somalis have fled Mogadishu after weekend fighting, the worst in months between Ethiopian troops backing the interim government and Islamist-led rebels, the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday. Most of the displaced headed for the town of Afgooye, 30km to the west, which is already struggling to cope with 100 000 people.
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/ 29 October 2007
Fifa’s executive committee has voted unanimously to end its policy of rotating the hosting of World Cups through its six continental confederations. Executive committee vice-president Chung Mong-joon told reporters on Monday that the rotation policy had been dropped with effect from the 2018 World Cup.
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/ 29 October 2007
Fifa’s executive committee is expected to drop its controversial Soccer World Cup rotation policy when it meets at the organisation’s headquarters in Zurich on Monday. World soccer’s governing body decided in 2000 that it would rotate its most prestigious tournament around its six continental confederations.
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/ 23 October 2007
Talks on a deal to free up world trade are making progress, developing country leaders said on Monday, but the chairperson of key industry negotiations said more needed to be done to reach an agreement. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the Doha round of trade could end in a deal by the end of the year.
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/ 22 October 2007
The nationalist Swiss People’s Party received the highest vote recorded to date for an individual political party in Switzerland, after a bitter campaign blaming foreigners for much of the country’s crime, according to official results released on Monday. The Federal Statistics Office put the party on 29% after Sunday’s elections.
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/ 17 October 2007
South Africa must do more to raise awareness of HIV/Aids amid rising child deaths and over one million children orphaned by the disease, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said Wednesday. ”Each year, 100Â 000 children contract Aids in South Africa, and half of them die before the age of two,” Unicef’s representative in the country, Macharia Kamau, said.
Global warming will produce stay-at-home tourists over the next few decades, radically altering travel patterns and threatening jobs and businesses in tourism-dependent countries, according to a stark assessment by United Nations experts. They said concerns about weather extremes and calls to reduce emissions-heavy air travel would make long-haul flights less attractive.
Climate change, environmental degradation and economic deprivation are among forces increasingly driving the dramatic growth in migration, the head of the United Nations refugee agency said on Monday, pointing to desertification, rising sea levels, water shortages and political conflicts.