Google wants to connect all of San Francisco to the internet with a free wireless service, creating a springboard for the online search-engine leader to leap into the telecommunications industry. The company filed an application on Friday to provide a wireless service that would enable anyone in San Francisco to connect to the internet.
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/ 30 September 2005
Cooler, wetter air and calmer wind helped thousands of firefighters battling a wildfire early on Friday that has pushed hundreds of people from their homes in the hills and canyons along Los Angeles’s north-western edge. The fire, which has burned an estimated 8 300ha, was 20% contained on Friday morning.
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/ 30 September 2005
Oscar-winning South African movie star Charlize Theron was welcomed into the heart of Tinseltown on Thursday when she was awarded her own star on Hollywood’s glittering Walk of Fame. The star of the 2003 film Monster turned out for the ceremony on Hollywood Boulevard’s famous pavement.
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/ 30 September 2005
New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been released from prison after agreeing to testify in a federal probe on the outing of an undercover CIA agent, the newspaper announced. Miller, who spent 12 weeks in a prison near Washington, was set free after her source waived her pledge of confidentiality, the Times said on Thursday.
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/ 30 September 2005
Democrats in Congress, who have steadily lost ground against governing Republicans in recent voting, are hoping that mounting ethics scandals will prompt voters to defect from United States President George Bush’s Republican party, with the 2006 election looming.
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/ 29 September 2005
John Roberts, President George Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, gained easy Senate confirmation on Thursday to become the United States high court’s 17th chief justice. Roberts was approved by a vote of 78 to 22, with all of the Senate’s 55 Republicans voting in lockstep to support the nominee.
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/ 29 September 2005
A half-century after his death, the memory and legacy of movie icon James Dean, who in a short but brilliant career incarnated the rebellious angst of a generation, burns brighter than ever. The actor and his off-screen persona left an indelible mark on both cinema and popular culture.
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/ 29 September 2005
In an embarrassing public-relations glitch, Apple on Wednesday admitted a flaw in its new iPod nano music players, saying that a small number of units have screens that could crack easily. The announcement sent shares of the company down by about 5% at one point on Wednesday when they touched ,70 from ,44.
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/ 29 September 2005
Most frogs settle for lily pads. Kermit the Frog has hopped on to a United States postage stamp. The green leader of the beloved Muppets troupe was on hand on Wednesday for a first-day issue ceremony featuring 11 postage stamps honouring the Muppets and late creator Jim Henson.
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/ 28 September 2005
Author M Scott Peck, who wrote the bestseller The Road Less Traveled and other self-help books, has died. He was 69. Peck died on Sunday at his home in Connecticut, long-time friend and Los Angeles publicist Michael Levine said. He had suffered from pancreatic and liver-duct cancer.
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/ 27 September 2005
Google will stop boasting on its home page about the number of web pages it has stored in its index, even as the online search engine leader continues a crusade to prove it scans substantially more material than its rivals. The company planned to remove the index size late on Monday.
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/ 27 September 2005
If proof were needed that United States oil refineries are stretched to breaking point, the twin hurricanes of Katrina and now Rita have provided ample evidence. A total of 859 rigs and platforms in the Gulf are unmanned after being evacuated last week before Rita swept through, US government figures showed on Monday.
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/ 26 September 2005
Albert ”Caesar” Tocco, a reputed Mob boss who was sentenced to 200 years after his wife took the unusual step of testifying against him, has died in an Indiana prison. He was 77. Tocco allegedly oversaw organised-crime operations in many of Chicago’s southern suburbs.
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/ 26 September 2005
Finance ministers from the world’s richest nations expressed their concern over sky-high oil prices during a weekend meeting in Washington, DC, and warned that fuel costs could derail global economic growth. Also, both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank agreed in principle to wipe out -billion in debt owed by the planet’s poorest countries.
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/ 26 September 2005
An estimated 24-million violent and property crimes were committed in the United States last year, which represents the lowest level in over three decades, according to a government report. The same survey, hailed by the Bush administration as a reward for its tough-on-crime policy, also found that only 50% of all assaults against individuals were being reported to authorities.
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/ 24 September 2005
The Oscar-winning maker of films such as Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, is to return to directing after an eight-year break in a big-screen adaptation of a Romanian short story. Coppola (66) is set to begin production in Bucharest on October 3 on the low-budget Youth Without Youth, based on the novella by Romanian author Mircea Eliade.
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/ 23 September 2005
It sounds like a great idea: Let’s just blast hurricanes like Rita and Katrina out of the sky before they hurt more people. Or, at least weaken the storms and steer them away from cities. Atmospheric scientists say it’s wishful thinking that we could destroy or even influence something as huge and powerful as a hurricane.
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/ 23 September 2005
Tens of thousands were on the highways fleeing Hurricane Rita, but at Kilkeanny’s Irish Bar in downtown Houston the party was still on. As the powerful storm churned toward the Gulf Coast, the Texas oil metropolis and fourth-largest United States city was eerily deserted except for very few places like Kilkeanny’s, where the bar was packed with beer drinkers and the loudspeakers blared electric blues.
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/ 23 September 2005
United States boxer Leavander Johnson died on Thursday from injuries sustained five days earlier in a lightweight title fight with Jesus Chavez. The 35-year-old died at University Medical Centre, where he had been hospitalised since being injured in the fight on Saturday at the MGM Grand hotel-casino.
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/ 23 September 2005
It was gripping television. A commercial jetliner unable to retract its front landing gear circled for three hours south of Los Angeles, burning fuel, before it attempted an emergency landing. As the pictures were carried live on TV, aviation experts pondered the likely fate of the 145 people on board.
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/ 22 September 2005
United States health officials are considering an unprecedented plan to stock homes with antidote kits in the event of a bio-terror attack, the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed on Tuesday. The feasibility of home antidote kits could be tested in the city of Seattle in the Pacific state of Washington, said Von Roebuck of the CDC.
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/ 22 September 2005
Hurricane Alpha? Tropical Storm Epsilon? Before this year’s frantic Atlantic hurricane season is out, television forecasters and coastal residents may have to break out their Greek dictionaries. There are only four names left for tropical storms and hurricanes this year: Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma.
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/ 22 September 2005
Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda for almost 20 years, the past nine as an elected president, says he has accomplished much of what he set out to do but still can’t shake his country’s lack of an industrial sector. He was addressing the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent foreign-policy think tank in Washington, DC.
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/ 22 September 2005
A United States airliner with 146 people on board made a dramatic but safe emergency landing on Wednesday amid a hail of sparks and smoke after its nose wheels jammed wildly out of alignment. Sparks, flames and a pall of thick smoke erupted from the tyres as they scraped along the tarmac.
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/ 21 September 2005
Powerful Hurricane Rita was upgraded to a category-four storm early on Wednesday as it roared into the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico, packing winds of 217kph, the Miami-based National Hurricane Centre said. The centre added that ”some additional strengthening is possible during the next 24 hours”.
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/ 21 September 2005
A Nasa orbiter has detected a series of dynamic geological and thermal changes on the surface of the red planet, possibly caused by a ”Mars quake”, mission scientists said on Tuesday. The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft found gullies on a sand dune that did not exist in 2002 and fresh tracks left by tumbling boulders.
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/ 21 September 2005
Plans by the United States to return to manned space exploration, with the moon as the first step in 2018, reflect a desire to maintain US leadership in the scientific world and, some day, to set foot on other planets in the solar system. The US space agency on Monday unveiled a billion project to send astronauts to the moon by 2018 with a design inspired by the Apollo programme of the 1960s, which put the first men on the lunar surface.
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/ 21 September 2005
A panel of experts on Zimbabwe admitted frustration on Tuesday that international pressure against President Robert Mugabe has failed to weaken his hold on power. Tom Woods, a top African affairs official at the United States State Department, said the grim prospect for Zimbabweans is that Mugabe will remain in power until his term ends in 2008.
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/ 20 September 2005
Former Tyco International chief Dennis Kozlowski and his top lieutenant, Mark Swartz, were each sentenced to up to 25 years in prison in New York on Monday for looting the company of hundreds of millions of dollars. The two men stood accused of using the conglomerate as a personal piggy bank.
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/ 20 September 2005
Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who helped track down numerous Nazi war criminals following World War II and then spent the later decades of his life fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people, died on Tuesday. Wiesenthal spent more than 50 years hunting Nazi war criminals.
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/ 20 September 2005
Gordon Gould, a pioneer in laser technology who coined the word ”laser” and won a decades-long struggle to secure patent rights for the most commonly used type, has died. He was 85. Gould, a resident of Sag Harbor, on Long Island, once said that his first ideas for the laser came suddenly to him in 1957.
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/ 19 September 2005
The United States will send four astronauts to the moon in 2018 in a return to its pioneering manned mission into space, Nasa administrator Michael Griffin announced on Monday. Nasa is to design a new rocket based on the technology from its ageing shuttles that are to be retired in 2010, Griffin said.