Trying to rescue a teenager from a subway track as a train roared in, Wesley Autrey faced a harrowing choice: try to pull the young man to the platform, or push him down and hope to find a safe harbour between the rails. ”I had to make a split decision whether or not to struggle and maybe end up getting us both killed,” Autrey said.
United States President George Bush promised on Wednesday to present a new Iraq policy in the days ahead amid warnings that even members of his own Republican party oppose escalating the unpopular war. The president has previously said he is considering ”all options,” including a temporary increase of US troops in Iraq.
Ban Ki-moon of South Korea takes over as United Nations Secretary General on Monday, facing numerous crises across the globe as well as the challenging task of reforming the United Nations itself. The 62-year-old diplomat’s handling of the reform, launched in 2005 by his predecessor Kofi Annan, will be closely watched by UN members, notably the most powerful, the United States, which strongly backed his candidacy.
This month, Siemens, the Germany-based global engineering and electronics company, informed the United States Securities and Exchange Commission that prosecutors investigating the company for corruption have seized bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, two leading ”offshore” banking centres.
Shopping list: 340 000kg of grain; 45 000kg of meat; 10 400 cases of mixed fruits and vegetables; bees. These are just a few of the ingredients for a year’s meals to feed the elephants, big cats, bats, birds, and other beasts at New York’s zoos.
Our ability to daydream about our future is closely related to our ability to recall our past, and may even depend on it, according to a study released on Monday which may explain a little-known quirk of the amnesiac’s condition. Researchers compared the brain activity of volunteers as they reminisced about past personal events such as a birthday, and then conjured up images of similar scenarios in the future.
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/ 31 December 2006
Amid all the changes in store for the US PGA Tour in 2007, expect one thing to stay the same: Tiger Woods will again reign supreme. The season starting with the Mercedes-Benz Championships at Kapalua, Hawaii, on Thursday is being touted by US tour officials as a ”new era” in golf.
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/ 31 December 2006
YouTube was poised on Saturday to ring in 2007 on a sour note by missing a deadline to deploy a system to prevent piracy of copyrighted music on the video-sharing website. Creating and installing an "advanced content identification and royalty reporting system" was at the heart of a precedent-setting agreement between YouTube and Warner Music Group in September.
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/ 31 December 2006
It would be ”awesome” if ”TomKat” and other combined nicknames for celebrity couples ”went missing” in the New Year, a Michigan university said on Sunday in its annual list of clichés deserving banishment. The university’s public relations staff culled its list of 16 cliches from 4Â 500 submissions, many of which demanded that something be done to stop the onslaught of the word ”awesome”.
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/ 30 December 2006
Mike Tyson was released without bond on a drug possession charge on Friday after an early morning arrest in which Buckeye police said it had found two bags of white powder in his back pocket. ”He said he was an addict and had a problem,” according to a police statement filed in Maricopa County Superior Court.
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/ 29 December 2006
Thousands of James Brown fans lined up on Thursday to bid farewell to the ”Godfather of Soul” at a public viewing of his body on the New York stage where the singer first made his mark more than 40 years ago. The 73-year-old entertainer died on Christmas day of congestive heart failure in Atlanta.
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/ 27 December 2006
Former United States president Gerald Ford, who was swept into office after the Watergate scandal, died at age 93, according to a statement from his widow on Tuesday. ”My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, has passed away at 93 years of age,” Betty Ford said in a statement.
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/ 23 December 2006
Oil prices fell in light pre-holiday trading on Friday, but held above a barrel as brokers weighed slower economic growth and expectations of a mild winter against the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ determination to tighten up worldwide supplies.
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/ 22 December 2006
After an historic 2005, the All Blacks were even more formidable this past season in an increasingly destined march to next year’s Rugby World Cup crown. New Zealand enjoyed 12 wins in 13 Tests, mirroring 2005 with only one loss, but without a Grand Slam tour of the United Kingdom or a series victory over the British and Irish Lions to parade.
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/ 22 December 2006
Serena and Venus Williams did not violate a contract with two promoters by not appearing at a 2001 tennis event, a jury ruled on Thursday. Promoters said they lost millions of dollars because the stars did not play, but jurors agreed with the argument of their attorney that their father, Richard Williams, was not empowered to represent them when he made the deal.
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/ 21 December 2006
From flaps over children singing Christmas carols to a row about Christmas trees at an airport or a traditional nativity play scrapped in favour of reggae-style carols, the Christian world is awash with examples of political correctness this season. Even Pope Benedict XVI has waded into the controversy.
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/ 20 December 2006
Deep inside the West Wing, across from the serving hatch for the White House cafeteria is a dark-paneled door that only the truly secure can enter. It opens into the Situation Room, where presidents plan wars, run top-secret operations and brainstorm crises at home and abroad.
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/ 20 December 2006
The number of residents in New York City could put such a strain on its infrastructure by 2030 that the demand for power exceeds the supply, housing becomes scarce and rush hour lasts all day because of an overwhelmed transit network. Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned that the city of 8,2-million people must start planning now for the expected population growth of another million over the next 25 years.
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/ 20 December 2006
Iraq and the election, Israel and Hezbollah, George Allen and George Bush, Mel Gibson and Madonna: the people, issues, images and absurdities of 2006 were inescapable, playing over and over before our eyes. It was all on YouTube — all in that index-card-sized, pixellated box.
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/ 19 December 2006
Some of rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest names have teamed up to sue the owner of a website that specialises in streaming rare concert recordings. Wolfgang’s Vault offers thousands of recordings of rare audio and video music performances collected over 30 years by Bill Graham, a famous concert promoter who died in 1991.
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/ 19 December 2006
Violent attacks in Iraq have soared to the highest level on record, the Pentagon said in a quarterly report, describing Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia as the single largest threat to stability. The report, released just hours after former CIA chief Robert Gates was sworn in on Monday as the new defence secretary, said there was an average of 959 attacks per week between August 12 and November 10.
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/ 19 December 2006
Web surfers may soon be able to explore the canyons of Mars and experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon thanks to a deal announced on Monday between web search company Google and the Nasa Ames Research Centre. Nasa and Google said they will work together on a range of technical problems and will make Nasa’s space exploration work more accessible to the public.
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/ 19 December 2006
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who leaves office in less than two weeks, is making a last-ditch effort to convince Sudan to accept a much stronger peacekeeping force in Darfur. Annan is sending a top aide, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, to Khartoum on Wednesday to pin down the government’s position on his proposal to build up the African Union mission already in Darfur.
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/ 19 December 2006
”Macaca” you are number one. The word macaca, used by outgoing Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia to describe a Democratic activist of Indian descent who was trailing his campaign, was named the most politically incorrect word of the year on Friday by Global Language Monitor.
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/ 18 December 2006
Former CIA director Robert Gates was officially sworn in as United States secretary of defence on Monday, replacing embattled Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who was under fire for his handling of the Iraq war. Gates was sworn in at 7.03am local time by White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten in the chief of staff’s office, a White House spokesperson said.
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/ 18 December 2006
An animal rights group on Friday accused Macy’s of selling a coat with a real animal fur collar even though it was advertised as fake fur. The Humane Society of the United States said a ,99 Sean John Hooded Snorkel Jacket for sale on Macy’s website was described as having an ”imitation rabbit fur collar”.
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/ 18 December 2006
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station readied for a fourth spacewalk on Monday to unstick a jammed solar array in an extra excursion that extended the space shuttle Discovery‘s mission at the orbiting outpost by a day. Astronauts Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang will try to clear snarled guidewires that are preventing the 33m panel from retracting.
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/ 17 December 2006
Congratulations! You are the Time magazine ”Person of the Year”. The annual honour for 2006 went to each and every one of us, as Time cited the shift from institutions to individuals — citizens of the new digital democracy, as the magazine put it.
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/ 16 December 2006
The worst windstorm in more than a decade tore through the north-western United States on Friday, leaving more than a million people without power and killing at least six. Winds gusted to a record 111kph at about 1am on Friday at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, breaking the old mark of 105kph set in 1993.
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/ 14 December 2006
United States actor Peter Boyle, best known for playing the irritable father in the television comedy series Everybody Loves Raymond, has died at the age of 71, his publicist announced. Boyle died on December 12 in a New York hospital after a long battle with multiple myeloma and heart disease, his publicist said.
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/ 14 December 2006
United States President George Bush says the enemy in Iraq is ”far from being defeated”, but he vows not to be rushed into adjusting his strategy and is giving little indication that he intends to veer sharply from the direction his war policies have taken. ”We’re not going to give up,” Bush said at the Pentagon on Wednesday.
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/ 13 December 2006
The global economy has reached a potentially dangerous ”turning point” with the United States at risk of recession if the housing market crashes, the World Bank warned on Wednesday. In a report called Global Economic Prospects, the bank also said globalisation is an unprecedented opportunity for developing nations.