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/ 14 October 2006
The next secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, pledged on Friday to be a decisive leader and cautioned those who call him low-key not to mistake him for a pushover. ”I may look low-key or [be] soft-spoken but that does not mean that I lack leadership or commitment,” Ban told Reuters.
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/ 13 October 2006
Initial tests of air samples taken by United States planes near North Korea found no evidence of radiation, but the US is not ready to declare that Pyongyang did not detonate a nuclear device, a US government intelligence official said on Friday. Monday’s announcement by North Korea that it had tested a nuclear bomb sharply escalated world concerns.
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/ 13 October 2006
Women in post-conflict societies should play a bigger role in revitalising their countries, researchers of a new study said. Research conducted in the aftermath of three recent conflicts analysed the role of women in peace processes as well as the security of women in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Lebanon.
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/ 13 October 2006
African-Americans hoping to use DNA to find their roots may have to look harder than previously thought, researchers said on Thursday in a study they said shows Africans are too genetically mixed to make tracing easy. Several companies now offer to help Americans trace their African ancestry using mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to daughter virtually unaltered.
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/ 13 October 2006
Walt Disney on Thursday said it took ”appropriate action” against employees at its Paris theme park who were caught simulating sex while dressed as Disney characters in a digital video that has received wide attention on the internet. Disney would not say whether it had dismissed any of the costumed employees featured in the grainy video, which appears to have been shot with a hidden camera.
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/ 13 October 2006
The Pennsylvania school in which five Amish girls were shot dead and five injured this month was bulldozed before dawn on Thursday and the rubble buried, as a small rural community attempted to erase all physical traces of the murders. The grave of the killer, Charles Carl Roberts, a local milk lorry driver who shot himself after the murders, has been vandalised.
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/ 11 October 2006
The United States Department of Homeland Security plans to develop software that analyses and summarises opinions expressed in articles, providing a possible tool for better monitoring what is written about the US in the global press. The department says it will spend ,4-million supporting research to analyse human language in texts.
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/ 11 October 2006
The United States is holding out hope for a breakthrough on world trade talks in the next six months, but Washington’s top trade official cautioned on Tuesday that the Doha round could be hampered by sensitive negotiations on farm trade and the US political calendar.
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/ 11 October 2006
Tiger Woods has won six United States PGA Tour events in a row and is producing some of the best golf of his career, but coach Hank Haney says there is still room for improvement. Haney, who helped guide Woods through a swing change that has revitalised his game, said the world number one has been hitting his irons so accurately that his short game has been neglected.
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/ 10 October 2006
Floyd Landis, who could become the first Tour de France champion to be stripped of the title over a doping charge, will release an online presentation outlining his defence, USA Today has reported. Landis told the newspaper he would post the presentation and documentation from his case on his personal website this week.
Even the most efficient student would have agonised over the assignment — a 30-page term paper on the social value of literary criticism. But Richard finished it in one evening, cutting and pasting paragraphs off the internet for an online company that sells papers to desperate United States college students.
A North Korean nuclear test would constitute a ”provocative act” and Washington expects the United Nations Security Council to take immediate actions, the White House said early on Monday. ”US and South Korean intelligence detected a seismic event [on] Sunday at a suspected nuclear test site in North Korea,” said White House spokesperson Tony Snow.
The first auction of official Star Trek memorabilia hit warp speed on Saturday when a determined bidder paid 000 for a model of the legendary science fiction franchise’s starship Enterprise, helping drive the total for the three-day sale above -million.
Sudan on Friday pressed efforts to mend fences with the United Nations, denying suggestions that it had tried to ”intimidate” countries planning to contribute troops to a proposed UN force for war-torn Darfur. On Thursday the Security Council held a special meeting to discuss a Sudanese letter sent to African and Arab countries on Tuesday warning them that providing troops for the UN force would be seen by Khartoum as a ”hostile act”.
One of the girls who died in Pennsylvania’s Amish schoolhouse massacre asked the killer to shoot her first in an apparent bid to save younger girls. Rita Rhoads, a nurse-midwife who delivered 13-year-old Marian Fisher as well as another victim, said Fisher appealed to Charles Carl Roberts to shoot her first because she thought it might allow younger girls to survive.
A spokesperson for Madonna on Wednesday denied claims by officials in Malawi that the pop star had adopted a one-year-old orphan boy there. Spokesperson Liz Rosenberg called the report ”completely inaccurate” but said Madonna was not bothered by it because it would draw attention to the problems of children in the impoverished African nation.
A run of tell-all books on United States President George Bush’s handling of Iraq and the war on terror has cast a harsh light on one of the administration’s biggest stars: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The books place Rice alongside Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the centre of a host of strategic miscalculations bureaucratic backstabbing and dodgy spin-doctoring.
Former Hewlett-Packard chairperson Patricia Dunn will fight ”false” criminal charges against her ”with everything she has,” her lawyer said on Wednesday. ”Today, in California, Pattie Dunn was charged with various offences. These charges are being brought against the wrong person at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons,” her lawyer Jim Brosnahan said in a statement here.
Google is introducing a new search service — strictly for computer programmers only. The web search leader said late on Wednesday it is introducing Google Code Search, a site that simplifies how software developers search for programming code to improve existing software or create new programs.
Harrah’s Entertainment, the world’s biggest casino operator, on Monday said it had received a -billion buyout offer from private equity firms Apollo Management and Texas Pacific Group. The proposed deal, which would rank as the fifth-largest leveraged buyout on record, signals new interest in the gambling sector for heavily funded private equity groups.
Many men who pay for sex are already in relationships, the findings of a small United Kingdom study show. The study ”raises awareness of the risks taken by men who pay for sex, and the risks they are also placing on their partners,” co-author Dr Tamsin Groom, a specialist registrar in sexual and reproductive health.
There was no warning, not even the roar of the approaching 737, before the two planes collided at 11 278m, according to a passenger aboard the smaller corporate jet whose seven occupants miraculously survived the fatal encounter. Joe Sharkey was on assignment in Brazil and relaxing aboard the Embraer Legacy 600 jet with his window shade closed when he felt the mid-air impact.
Several people were shot and killed by a hostage taker who opened fire at an Amish school in Pennsylvania on Monday, police said, in the third fatal shooting at a United States school in a week. ”There are a number dead. The exact number I am not sure at this point. There are also a number of wounded. And the shooter is not at large,” said Ralph Striebig of the state police.
United States President George Bush on Saturday challenged ”misimpressions” about the Iraq war as he battled a gloomy intelligence assessment of the conflict and the fallout of a book portraying him as in denial over it. With five weeks to go before midterm elections, Democrats seeking to win control of Congress seized on both revelations to charge that Bush was mishandling the war and Republican lawmakers were failing to hold him accountable.
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/ 30 September 2006
The United States Senate on Saturday authorised -billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nearly -billion for defence programmes in the fiscal year that begins on Sunday. The early morning passage marked the final Bill approved by Congress before a long recess so that lawmakers can campaign for re-election on November 7.
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/ 28 September 2006
About 2,6-billion people in the world, mainly in Africa and Asia, lack access to basic sanitation, increasing the risk of diarrhoea and other diseases fatal to children, said a United Nations report released on Thursday. Unicef, the UN children’s fund, concluded that UN goals could be met on clean water, especially in urban areas.
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/ 28 September 2006
Tarantulas can produce silk from spigots on their feet as well as from their abdominal spinnerets, a finding that could help explain why spiders began to spin silk in the first place, researchers said on Wednesday. The foot silk appears to help keep the spiders from sliding on slippery surfaces, Adam Summers of the University of California at Irvine and colleagues reported.
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/ 28 September 2006
United States officials are expected to seek the extradition of the indicted former chief executive of voicemail-software maker Comverse Technology during a hearing on Thursday in Namibia, the south-west African country where he was captured following a two-month international manhunt.
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/ 27 September 2006
Blues guitarist Henry Townsend, who ran away from his family as a boy and stayed in St Louis for a prolific career spanning eight decades, has died at age 96. Townsend died on September 24 2006 of a pulmonary embolism in Grafton, Wisconsin, where he was being honoured by a local blues association.
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/ 27 September 2006
MSN, Microsoft’s web portal, said on Tuesday it will make a big push to stream live concerts to its users after signing an exclusive global partnership with Control Room, the company behind the web broadcast of last year’s Live 8 event. The move to offer live performances online is the latest move by Microsoft to drive consumer and advertiser growth with a range of new entertainment and media features.
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/ 27 September 2006
Sony said on Tuesday it will launch an electronic book store on the internet and start selling a device that displays e-books purchased from the store on October 1, after missing an earlier unveiling due to technical reasons. The Sony Connect book store will carry about 10 000 books from the top six publishers, including News Corporation’s HarperCollins and CBS’s Simon & Schuster.
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/ 26 September 2006
Bemoaning an election-year leak, President George Bush on Tuesday said he would declassify a secret terrorism document that included a judgement that the Iraq war had spread Islamic extremism. At a news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Bush said political opponents had disclosed only select parts of the National Intelligence Estimate.