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/ 6 December 2005
King Kong has captivated New Yorkers since he first stepped foot in the city, quickly taking on legendary status with his building-scaling, blonde-loving ways. He is such a legend that that some movie fans occasionally speak of him as if he is more than myth. He is so huge here that some history professors use him to study New York’s past.
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/ 6 December 2005
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is tightening submission rules after a prominent journalist complained that an article falsely implicated him in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St Petersburg, Florida-based website, said on Monday.
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/ 5 December 2005
Jermain Taylor, who earned the middleweight world title in controversial style, kept it in more convincing fashion on Saturday with a unanimous 12-round decision over former champ Bernard Hopkins. The second fight between the two Americans had been much anticipated after Taylor ended Hopkins’s reign of more than 10 years in July with a controversial 12-round split decision.
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/ 4 December 2005
Time Warner is girding for battle with Carl Icahn as the billionaire corporate raider steps up his offensive against the world’s biggest media-entertainment company. Icahn, a financier who is one of the wealthiest Americans and has a history of hostile takeover moves, controls only about 2,8% of the shares of Time Warner with his partners.
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/ 2 December 2005
Bernard Hopkins, still seething over the controversial decision that saw Jermain Taylor take away his undisputed world middleweight title, says he won’t leave it to the judges in Saturday’s rematch. ”December 3 is going to rectify the system’s problems,” vowed Hopkins, who at 40 knows he has little time left to cement his status in ring history.
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/ 1 December 2005
In full page ads placed in leading United States newspapers on Thursday, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company vaunted its ”humanitarian” assistance to low-income US residents struggling with soaring heating costs. ”We’re not just any oil company,” said the ad, describing a programme providing 45,4-million litres of heating oil at unspecified ”deeply discounted prices” to low income families.
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/ 1 December 2005
The maker of the BlackBerry handheld computer, Research in Motion, moved closer to a potentially devastating court injunction in the United States market on Wednesday after a judge denied its request to end a patent-violation lawsuit. In the US, more than two million people use the BlackBerry for wireless e-mail and other functions.
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/ 30 November 2005
The United States economy grew at a lively 4,3% pace from July to September, the best showing in more than a year. The performance offers fresh testimony that the country’s overall economic health managed to improve despite the destructive force of Gulf Coast hurricanes.
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/ 30 November 2005
The White House, in its most detailed public plan yet for success in Iraq, said on Wednesday it expects to reduce United States forces there in 2006, but warned the country is likely to face violence ”for many years to come”. The White House released the strategy to set the stage for a speech a few hours later by President George Bush.
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/ 29 November 2005
The jukebox at the bar in Chicago that Brian Toro manages isn’t gathering dust just yet — but it may only be a matter of time. The popular nightspot is among a growing number of places across the United States where people can bring their iPods and other portable music players and, for as long as the bartender allows, share their personal favourites with the crowd.
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/ 29 November 2005
A horse-drawn wagon pulled up to the White House on Monday with a 5,6m Christmas tree that will adorn the Blue Room, marking the official start of the holiday decorating season. First Lady Laura Bush walked outside to receive the Fraser fir that was pulled up the driveway to the North Portico by two horses.
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/ 28 November 2005
The drug maker Merck & Co said on Monday that it will cut about 7 000 jobs, or 11% of its work force, by the end of 2008 and will close or sell five of its 31 manufacturing plants in moves that it says will save up to -billion. It employs just less than 63 000 people.
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/ 25 November 2005
Actor Pat Morita, whose portrayal of the wise and dry-witted Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid earned him an Oscar nomination, has died. He was 73. Morita died on Thursday at his home in Las Vegas of natural causes, said his wife of 12 years, Evelyn.
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/ 24 November 2005
Dinner shared by a group of friends at a well-appointed Greenwich Village apartment features eggplant Parmesan with a salad of mixed greens and avocado dressing. The guests already have snacked on hors d’oeuvres of smoked mozzarella and crackers. Not bad considering the diners find their food by digging through garbage.
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/ 24 November 2005
United States gay-rights advocates on Wednesday denounced a Vatican edict that bans anyone with ”homosexual tendencies” from entering the Roman Catholic priesthood. The ”instruction” damages the church and will hamper the recruitment of new priests, said a Catholic group that has campaigned for tolerance of homosexuals.
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/ 23 November 2005
North Korea’s demand that it be given light-water nuclear reactors before it would open up to atomic inspections and disarmament got a sharp rebuff as the partners in an energy consortium agreed with United States policy and terminated the reactor-building project.
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/ 23 November 2005
Hollywood negotiated an agreement on Tuesday with the creator of BitTorrent software, popular for downloading pirated movies over the internet, in a deal aimed at reducing illegal traffic in online films. The agreement requires 30-year-old software designer Bram Cohen to prevent his website, www.bittorrent.com, from locating pirated versions of popular movies.
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/ 23 November 2005
The redesigned Honda Civic was named Motor Trend magazine’s 2006 car of the year on Tuesday, one of the most prestigious awards in the United States auto industry. ”Honda deserves a standing ovation for not playing it safe again,” Motor Trend editor-in-chief Angus MacKenzie said in a statement.
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/ 23 November 2005
Skinned and dissected, muscles, tendons and organs in full view, 22 bodies provided by a Chinese university have become one of the most controversial exhibitions seen in New York in recent years. The bodies have been placed in normal poses inside glass cases for people to gaze upon since Saturday.
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/ 23 November 2005
The International Press Freedom Awards for 2005 went to a Chinese editor still imprisoned in his homeland, a Brazilian reporter who could not travel to New York because he is pinned down by lawsuits, an Uzbek journalist in exile, and a Zimbabwean media lawyer. The laureates honoured by the Committee to Protect Journalists have endured beatings, threats and prison as a consequence of their work.
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/ 23 November 2005
A millennium has passed, but the massacre is still chilling: a king and queen of ancient Cancuen, more than 30 nobles and pregnant women, are overwhelmed by their attackers and murdered with spears and axes. Deep in Guatemala’s Peten rainforest, the ruins of the sprawling palace in the old royal city have revealed skeletons and the last-minute panic that overtook Cancuen before it was overcome by marauders.
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/ 22 November 2005
”Dirty bomb” suspect Jose Padilla, a United States citizen held without charges for more than three years, faces charges of conspiring to ”murder, kidnap and maim persons” overseas, under an indictment unsealed on Tuesday. A grand jury in Miami returned the indictment against Padilla and four others.
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/ 22 November 2005
Hugh Sidey, whose personal portraits of America’s chief executives appeared in Time magazine’s The Presidency column over four decades, died on Monday. He was 78. His brother, Ed Sidey, said other relatives told him Sidey had suffered a heart attack in Paris.
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/ 22 November 2005
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire may be the scariest of the films about the teen wizard but it also had the most successful opening of the series. Warner Brothers said Potter was the top film in all 19 countries where it opened at the weekend, including the United States, where it ended a box-office slump, and in Britain, where it smashed all records.
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/ 22 November 2005
Anyone who snagged one of Microsoft’s new Xbox 360s at its Tuesday debut will likely see the new video-game console as just that — a medium for spending hours playing the likes of Halo II and Project Gotham Racing III. But executives at Microsoft see video games as just the beginning.
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/ 22 November 2005
Closing nine plants and laying off thousands of workers will only exacerbate General Motors’ (GM) woes, the auto maker’s main union said Monday. The plant closures in Michigan, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Canada announced by the auto maker on Monday will result in the loss of 30 000 jobs.
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/ 22 November 2005
Increasing levels of ocean noise generated by military sonar, shipping, and oil and gas exploration is threatening dolphins and whales that rely on sound for mating, finding food and avoiding predators, according to a new report. The report found that the affects of ocean noise on marine life range from long-term behavioral change to hearing loss to death.
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/ 22 November 2005
United States media organisations are now skewering President George Bush over his case for ousting Saddam Hussein, but few questioned the pro-war juggernaut in the run-up to battle. Now, with the White House’s once-feared public-relations machine misfiring, Bush’s approval ratings plumbing their lowest depths, many commentators and journalists are piling on.
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/ 21 November 2005
The Washington Post‘s editorial watchdog slammed legendary reporter Bob Woodward on Sunday for committing a journalistic ”sin” by keeping from his paper what he knew in a CIA leak case that has rocked the White House. The newspaper’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, said Woodward should follow the same rules as other Post journalists despite the fame he has garnered since his prize-winning work in the Watergate scandal.
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/ 21 November 2005
Doubts are being cast on the guilt of a Texas man executed more than a dozen years ago after the crime’s lone witness recanted and a co-defendant said he allowed his friend to be falsely accused under police pressure, the Houston Chronicle reported on Sunday.
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/ 21 November 2005
Its scent has drawn comparisons to garbage and spoiled meat, but that isn’t stopping crowds from flocking to see — and smell –- an unusual plant in bloom at the United States Botanic Garden. The titan arum plant, nicknamed ”corpse plant” for its rank smell, is attracting thousands of visitors during the day or two it remains in bloom.
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/ 18 November 2005
Actor Russell Crowe was scheduled to appear in Manhattan criminal court on Friday, accused of throwing a phone at a hotel concierge in June. If convicted of assault and criminal possession of a weapon, the Oscar winner could lose his right to work in the United States and face seven years in prison. His lawyers have been working to reduce the charges.