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/ 30 October 2005
Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong poked fun at French critics and their accusations of doping in New York on Saturday, playing the controversy for laughs while hosting Saturday Night Live. The French newspaper L’Equipe reported 1999 urine samples from Armstrong tested positive for a banned substance.
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/ 28 October 2005
An embattled White House braced on Friday for criminal charges against Vice-President Dick Cheney’s top aide in an investigation of the leak of an undercover CIA officer’s identity. Meanwhile, President George Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, remains under investigation.
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/ 28 October 2005
New York City has many odours, but when the city began to smell a little too good, New Yorkers became alarmed. Residents from the southern tip of Manhattan to the Upper West Side nearly 16km north called a city hotline to report a strong odour on Thursday night that most compared to maple syrup.
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/ 28 October 2005
George Takei, best known for his role as Mr Sulu in Star Trek, came out as a homosexual in the current issue of a magazine covering the Los Angeles gay and lesbian community. Takei said on Thursday that his role as psychologist Martin Dysart in the play Equus inspired him to publicly discuss his sexuality.
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/ 28 October 2005
It’s one of the stranger consequences of globalisation: in India, salesmen are going door to door selling satellite radios that receive, among other things, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. The company behind this combination of 1930s-style marketing and space-age technology is WorldSpace, a Washington, DC-based outfit that is trying to make satellite radio a global phenomenon.
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/ 28 October 2005
The road from New Orleans to Chicago has been a long one for bartenders Webb Rhodes and Fritz Voght. Two months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged their city and destroyed their way of life, the longtime friends are still scrambling to find work and a place to live. It hasn’t been easy.
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/ 27 October 2005
United States President George Bush announced on Thursday that his choice to fill a US Supreme Court vacancy, Harriet Miers, had withdrawn her nomination. The surprise withdrawal of Miers’s nomination comes just over three weeks after she was recommended for the high-profile legal post by Bush on October 3.
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/ 27 October 2005
Danny de Vito has a $26 cheque waiting for him from All-State Insurance. Reese Witherspoon is owed nearly $100 by Tiffany. And California first lady Maria Shriver has more than $300 waiting for her in the state’s unclaimed property vault, according to the state controller’s website.
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/ 26 October 2005
Google is testing technology that would expand its online empire to include internet auctions and classified ads, the company said on Tuesday. The internet search leader and stock market darling made the announcements after researchers uncovered sample web pages on the company’s internet site.
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/ 26 October 2005
White House lawyers really have their hands full: Top Bush administration aides are under investigation, the president wants to secure a Supreme Court seat for his top legal aide — and a satirical website is using the presidential seal. Preventing The Onion from using the symbol of United States presidential power became an official matter after a White House lawyer asked the online magazine to remove the seal from its website.
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/ 25 October 2005
The White House on Tuesday defended Vice-President Dick Cheney after a news report appeared to deepen links between him and the criminal investigation into who unmasked a CIA agent in 2003. ”The vice-president is doing a great job as a member of this administration, and the president appreciates all that he’s doing,” said Scott McClellan, chief spokesperson for US President George Bush.
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/ 25 October 2005
While the United States and France are seeking a resolution to pressure Syria to cooperate with an investigation into the murder of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri, other members are asking for more time, The Washington Post said on Wednesday.
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/ 25 October 2005
A disgruntled buyer of Apple’s hit miniature music player the iPod Nano is suing the company for knowingly selling a defective product and is hoping to turn his case into a class-action lawsuit, according to reports on Monday. The suit was filed last week by Jason Tomczak, who bought an iPod Nano in September.
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/ 25 October 2005
A quiet revolution is transforming life on the internet: new, agile software now lets people quickly check flight options, see stock prices fluctuate and better manage their online photos and e-mail. Such tools make computing less of a chore because they sit on distant web servers and run over standard browsers.
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/ 25 October 2005
A quiet revolution is transforming life on the internet: new, agile software now lets people quickly check flight options, see stock prices fluctuate and better manage their online photos and e-mail. Such tools make computing less of a chore because they sit on distant web servers and run over standard browsers.
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/ 25 October 2005
Legendary singer and pianist Shirley Horn, known for her deliberately slow renditions of jazz standards, has died at 71 in the Washington area, a member of her entourage said on Friday. Horn was discovered in 1960 by producer Quincy Jones and legendary trumpeter Miles Davis.
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/ 25 October 2005
Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, has died at age 92. Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title of ”mother of the civil rights movement”.
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/ 25 October 2005
Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, has died at age 92. Parks died on Monday evening at her home during the evening of natural causes. She was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title of ”mother of the civil rights movement”.
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/ 24 October 2005
Harriet Miers nominated by President George Bush to fill a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court currently lacks the votes for her confirmation by the US Senate, despite an intense White House campaign to sell her candidacy, lawmakers from both parties acknowledged.
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/ 24 October 2005
Scott Podsednik belted a walk-off home run to seal a 7-6 White Sox victory over Houston on Sunday, insuring Chicago teammate Paul Konerko’s grand slam didn’t go to waste in game two of the World Series. The White Sox seized a two-games-to-none lead in the best-of-seven Major League Baseball championship series, which heads to Houston on Tuesday for game three.
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/ 22 October 2005
In the clearest indication to date that criminal charges against top White House officials may be in the offing, the special prosecutor investigating the CIA leak case has unveiled his own website — one week before his probe was scheduled to wrap up.
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/ 21 October 2005
When Google commanded per share in its August 2004 initial public offering, the prospect of the stock quadrupling in less than 15 months ago seemed inconceivable. It doesn’t appear far-fetched now: Google’s shares hit a new all-time high early on Friday, rising by ,69 to ,89 in morning New York Stock Exchange trading.
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/ 21 October 2005
Apparently Ken still isn’t over Barbie. Almost two years after the closely watched celebrity couple split after a 43-year romance, Ken is considering a makeover in an
effort to win his doll baby back. Mattel made the announcement on Thursday. Russell Arons, vice-president of marketing at Mattel, would say only that fans might see big changes this spring.
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/ 19 October 2005
Washington’s power-broking elite is shaken and stirred, and revolt is brewing over the Dom Perignon and canapés at the latest threat to the United States capital’s everyday life. What can have so vexed the cocktail party set? A new al-Qaeda terror threat? Quagmire in Iraq?
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/ 19 October 2005
Hurricane Wilma, which swelled into an ”extremely dangerous” category-five storm on Wednesday, threatening Mexico and the Caribbean, is the strongest hurricane on record in the Atlantic, the United States National Hurricane Centre said.
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/ 19 October 2005
Two men at the centre of one of the sporting world’s largest drug scandals were sentenced to prison terms on Tuesday by a United States federal court judge on Tuesday. Judge Susan Illston sentenced Victor Conte, founder of Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco), and Greg Anderson, who served as a personal trainer to Barry Bonds, to penalties of four months and three months in jail respectively.
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/ 19 October 2005
Researchers are exploring the implications of allowing HIV-positive patients to take a break from their medications every weekend.
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/ 19 October 2005
Internet blogs are getting a boost from the big search engines, which make the personal journals more accessible and move them toward mainstream journalism, analysts say. Yahoo this month said it would include blogs on all its news searches, saying it would give readers more access to "grassroots journalism."
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/ 18 October 2005
Jurors in United States death penalty cases are often excluded because of race and gender, are not shown critical evidence and tend to be conviction prone, the Death Penalty Information Centre said on Tuesday in a report. ”While most Americans never serve on a capital jury,” the report said, ”everyone is affected by a system that fails to respect those who do serve and that falls woefully short of justice.”
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/ 18 October 2005
World oil prices shot higher on Monday as Tropical Storm Wilma raised fresh concern over hurricane-battered production in the United States Gulf of Mexico. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in November, jumped $1,73 to close at $64,36 per barrel.
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/ 17 October 2005
For the first time in history, the list used for naming tropical storms in the Atlantic Ocean is running out of names. With the naming of Tropical Storm Wilma on Monday morning, the list of 21 names used this year has reached its end. Wilma is gathering strength and is expected to become a hurricane this week.
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/ 13 October 2005
United States talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey, whose influence can turn the New York Times bestseller list on its head, is having a similar impact on the FBI’s most-wanted list with a campaign to catch fugitive paedophiles. Winfrey launched ”Oprah’s Child Predator Watch List” last week, to almost immediate results.