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/ 27 January 2008
The Directors Guild of America on Saturday chose Ethan and Joel Coen as best feature film directors for 2007 for their gritty crime drama No Country for Old Men. ”It’s nice to get the acknowledgment of critics and even audiences, but there is something about being acknowledged by people who do the same thing you do,” said Joel Coen.
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/ 25 January 2008
The show will go on, even if there is a picket at the red carpet, writes Dan Glaister.
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/ 24 January 2008
The United States said on Thursday it has raised its concerns with Zimbabwe over a political opponent’s arrest which it called a bid to intimidate and muzzle democratic opposition. The US ambassador to Harare, James McGee, spoke on Wednesday to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai after he was released after several hours in custody.
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/ 24 January 2008
The United States on Wednesday welcomed the peace agreement reached in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) strife-torn Kivu provinces and urged all parties to ensure its prompt implementation. ”The US welcomes the signing of a peace,” White House spokesperson Dana Perino said in a statement.
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/ 23 January 2008
Actor Heath Ledger was found dead at a Manhattan apartment, naked in bed with sleeping pills nearby, police said. He was 28. Ledger, who moved to the United States at age 19, quickly turned away from typical teen films and instead started to build a career on more challenging roles.
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/ 22 January 2008
The New Yorker art rebel and Holocaust survivor Boris Lurie died after a long, difficult illness, the Berlin publicist Matthias Reichelt said on Tuesday. Lurie, who was 83, died on Monday. Born in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union, Lurie was an artist and author who survived several different concentration camps.
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/ 22 January 2008
The United States Federal Reserve on Tuesday slashed a key interest rate by a hefty three-quarters of a percentage point, the biggest cut in more than 23 years, after a two-day global stocks rout sparked by fears of a US recession. ”The Fed is very, very, very worried,” said John Tierney, an analyst at Deutsche Bank.
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/ 22 January 2008
United Nations peacekeepers monitoring the disputed border between Ethiopia and Eritrea may have to halt operations within weeks because Eritrea has cut diesel fuel supplies, said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The fuel stoppage is linked to the border dispute that brought the two impoverished Horn of Africa countries.
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/ 22 January 2008
In the 80 years since the first Oscars were handed out, it has taken a war or a flood or an assassination to delay the celebration surrounding the film industry’s highest honours. Now Hollywood is wringing its hands over whether the strike by screenwriters could, or should, be enough to postpone the Academy Awards.
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/ 22 January 2008
Microsoft on Monday announced several moves it says will help its business customers take advantage of a technology called virtualisation, and in the process help the software maker catch up with VMware, the front-runner in that area. Virtualisation allows one physical computer to house multiple ”virtual machines”.
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/ 22 January 2008
The United States Federal Reserve on Tuesday slashed benchmark US interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point in an emergency bid to lend support to a US economy some fear is on the verge of recession. The Fed’s action took the key federal funds rate, which governs overnight lending between banks, down to 3,5%.
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/ 22 January 2008
Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama engaged in a bitter crossfire on Monday as their United States presidential campaign took an ugly personal turn on the Martin Luther King holiday. Obama’s complaints about former President Bill Clinton’s attacks on him on behalf of his wife’s campaign boiled over at a rancorous debate.
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/ 19 January 2008
With notebook and desktop computer prices at an all-time low, you have to think carefully about upgrading them. The cost of a few upgrades may come close to equalling the price of an entirely new system. In general, you’ll probably want to avoid upgrades designed to improve performance.
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/ 17 January 2008
Actor Brad Renfro, former child star of such films as The Client and Tom and Huck who had battled drug abuse in recent years, was found dead in Los Angeles on January 14 at the age of 25. A Los Angeles county coroner’s spokesperson said Renfro’s cause of death was under investigation.
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/ 17 January 2008
Celebrated United States cancer researcher Judah Folkman, who demonstrated the link between blood-vessel growth and tumours becoming malignant, died on January 14 at 74 of an apparent heart attack, the Boston hospital where he worked said. He died in Denver, Colorado, while en route to Vancouver, Canada, to give a lecture.
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/ 17 January 2008
Disgraced American Olympic hero Marion Jones said she hasn’t told her young son that she is going to jail for lying to law-enforcement officials about using steroids and a check-fraud scheme. Jones was speaking on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Wednesday, less than two months before she is expected to begin serving a six-month prison sentence.
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/ 16 January 2008
Scientists in Uruguay have found the fossil remains of a 1 000kg rodent that lived two million to four million years ago — the largest rodent found to date. The giant creature probably ate soft food such as fruit or tender plants, Andres Rinderknecht and Ernesto Blanco reported on Wednesday.
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/ 16 January 2008
The award-winning Broadway musical Rent will end its 12-year-run in New York this June, according to an announcement on the production’s website. The musical, composed by Jonathan Larson, chronicles the struggles of a group of young artists in New York.
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/ 16 January 2008
A federal judge in Washington has ordered Libya and six of its officials to pay more than -billion in damages to families of seven Americans killed in the 1989 bombing of a French airliner, lawyers for the families said in a statement late on Tuesday.
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/ 16 January 2008
Apple has already made waves with its iPod, iPhone and trendy desktop computers, but on Tuesday night the company threw out a new challenge to its competitors, the world’s thinnest laptop. The secretive Silicon Valley company confirmed the launch of the  352 (R16 061) Macbook Air, which measures just 2cm deep.
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/ 14 January 2008
Advances in digital technology are set to transform the automotive world, making cars safer, more efficient and more fun to drive, says General Motors chairperson Rick Wagoner. His speech at last week’s Consumer Electronics World, the world’s largest technology fair, signified how fast cars are integrating electronic gadgets.
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/ 14 January 2008
Girding for a potential threat from Apple, online DVD rental service Netflix is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed internet connections. The change will become effective on Monday, on the eve of Apple’s widely anticipated move into the movie rental industry.
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/ 14 January 2008
If a movie wins a Golden Globe, but there’s no ceremony, does the prize still count? That’s the issue faced by the Hollywood studios behind such films as Atonement and Sweeney Todd, which lost their moments of glory on Sunday to the Hollywood writers strike.
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/ 13 January 2008
No red carpet, no Keira or Angelina, no best-dressed/worst-dressed lists, no goody bags, no limo rides, no parties and no champagne. Sunday’s lacklustre Golden Globe awards will sound an alarm across Los Angeles: the show does not go on.
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/ 12 January 2008
The United Nations Security Council opened the door on Friday to new economic, political or military sanctions against Sudan because of an attack by its troops on a UN peacekeeping convoy earlier this week. The council said it ”condemns in the strongest possible terms” Monday’s attack on UN peacekeepers by ”elements of the Sudanese armed forces”.
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/ 12 January 2008
Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton on Friday proposed -billion in emergency spending to stave off a possible United States election-year recession, upstaging Republican rivals who clashed over the economy but offered few specifics.
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/ 10 January 2008
It is billed as the ”first flush” — the ceremonial opening of a new public toilet on the streets of New York City. The first of 20 public toilets under the city’s street-furniture contract with Spanish advertising giant Cemusa opened on Thursday at Madison Square Park in Manhattan.
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/ 10 January 2008
Morocco and Western Sahara’s Polisario independence movement ended a third round of talks near New York City on Wednesday without narrowing differences on Africa’s longest-running territorial dispute. But United Nations mediator Peter van Valsum said the sides had agreed to meet again from March 11 to 13 at the same location in the town of Manhasset.
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/ 10 January 2008
What’s in store for tech fans in 2008? Plenty. If the stirrings of the present are any indication of what’s on the horizon, technology buffs can look forward to products that are better, faster, and less expensive than those we rely on today. The best news of all is that some of the most exciting products should appear earlier in 2008 rather than later on.
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/ 10 January 2008
As adult obesity balloons in the United States, being overweight has become less of a health hazard and more of a lifestyle choice, the author of a new book argues. ”Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labour-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less,” health economist Eric Finkelstein says.
Two New York men wheeled the corpse of their friend around the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan in an office chair in a failed attempt to cash his Social Security cheque, police said. Virgilio Cintron (66) had already died of natural causes when two of his friends, both aged 65, brought him to a cheque-cashing store on Tuesday.
Leasing company Awas (Ireland) is expected to announce a deal to buy up to 100 Airbus jets worth $6,9-billion, the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> reported on Wednesday. The news came after aerospace group Boeing said it delivered 441 commercial airplanes in 2007 as part of a tight race with Europe’s Airbus.