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/ 15 January 2005
A United States federal judge has ordered a Georgian school district to remove stickers from its science textbooks that declared that ”evolution is a theory, not a fact”. Judge Clarence Cooper of the Federal District Court ruled that the stickers were contrary to the First Amendment’s promise to separate church and state.
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/ 12 January 2005
Rescuers searching with shovels, high-tech cameras and their bare hands found the bodies of three children and an adult before dawn on Wednesday, bringing the death toll from a mudslide in the Californian seaside hamlet of La Conchita to 10, an official said.
Frantic search for survivors
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/ 12 January 2005
For the first time in history, Nasa is setting off on a collision course with a comet, in hopes of blasting a huge hole in the celestial snowball and gazing upon the original ingredients of the solar system preserved inside. It all begins with a planned Wednesday launch of Deep Impact, a copper-fortified, comet-busting spacecraft.
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/ 12 January 2005
Rescuers dug mud with shovels and bare hands on Tuesday in a search for survivors buried under landslides in California unleashed by almost two weeks of heavy storms that have killed at least 15 people. The torrent of mud engulfed 20 homes in the small town of La Conchita in south-west California.
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/ 12 January 2005
Apple Computer chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled a very small computer on Tuesday and a flash memory-based music player called the iPod Shuffle. The new products seek to make inroads against the traditionally more affordable PC market and against lower-cost competitors to Apple’s wildly popular iPod.
United States scientists have detected the largest explosion to date in the universe, which saw a mass equivalent to about 300-million suns sucked into a black hole, Nasa said on Thursday. ”The eruption, which has lasted for more than 100-million years, has generated energy equivalent to hundreds of millions of gamma-ray bursts,” Nasa said.
Miss Beazley, a 10-week-old female Scottish terrior puppy, moved into the White House on Thursday. Bred in New Jersey, Miss Beazley was a gift from United States President George Bush to his wife, First Lady Laura Bush, for her 58th birthday in November.
Doctors at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib used their medical knowledge to help devise coercive interrogation methods for detainees, including sleep deprivation, stress positions and other abuse, it was reported on Thursday. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine shows doctors were active participants in the abuse of prisoners.
A Supreme Court judge in Oklahoma is suing colleagues on the bench for passing him over for the state’s top judicial job because he is too old. Marian Opala (83) will take fellow judges to court for age discrimination after a rule change denied him his turn to be the state’s Supreme Court chief justice.
The first political battle since United States President George Bush’s re-election begins on Thursday at a Senate hearing to confirm as attorney general the president’s nomination of a lawyer caught up in the scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Alberto Gonzales is currently Bush’s chief legal adviser.
The skies over Asia are being darkened these days by an abundance of relief-bearing cargo planes, reflecting the huge outpouring of international sympathy and support in response to the tsunami crisis. But in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, people might reasonably ask: ”How about some relief for us?”
A United States federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out a defamation lawsuit that Evel Knievel and his wife brought against the cable television sports network ESPN for labelling the daredevil a ”pimp”. The 66-year-old Knievel and his wife, Krystal, claimed a caption to a photograph posted on ESPN’s website damaged their reputations.
On the opening day of a trial in Newark, New Jersey, on Tuesday, a British man was accused of offering to sell 200 shoulder-fired missiles to a Somali group he thought would use them to shoot down United States commercial airliners. However, the man claims he was the victim of a sting operation.
Napster, the name that once was a symbol of rampant music piracy, on Monday completed its transformation to respectability by becoming a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq exchange. The new company is a far cry from the old Napster, which had as many as 70-million members freely trading music files.
The man who brought the Yugo and Subaru to the United States and built a gull-wing sports car bearing his name has a new project — selling Chinese-made cars in the US. Chery Automobile, owned by the Chinese government, has signed a deal with the privately held Visionary Vehicles of New York to sell Chery’s cars in the US.
Readership of the online journals known as blogs (short for web logs) grew significantly in 2004, driven by increased awareness of them during the United States presidential campaign and other major news events, according to a study released on Sunday. Twenty-seven percent of online adults in the US said in November they read blogs.
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/ 22 December 2004
The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday threatened to take measures against Sudan, blaming it for the ”serious degradation of the security and humanitarian situation in Darfur and repeated violations of the ceasefire”. The council condemned ceasefire violations and the shooting at an African Union helicopter.
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/ 22 December 2004
A United States man who served nearly 17 years for rape was freed from prison after DNA tests determined he was not responsible for the crime. He said he feels ”numb”. ”Have you ever had novocaine? It’s a lot like that, just from head to toe,” he said. He had been serving a 75-year sentence after his 1988 conviction for sexual assault.
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/ 21 December 2004
Harry Potter readers, here’s an extra special holiday gift: JK Rowling announced that she has completed the sixth Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The book will go on sale in Britain and the United States on July 16, publishers said on Tuesday. Rowling has said that one of her characters will not survive her sixth book.
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/ 20 December 2004
Amelia Earhart once said that preparation is two-thirds of any venture. But on the morning of July 2 1937, even the best-prepared flight ended in tragedy when Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished as they approached a tiny Pacific island on one of the last legs of a groundbreaking round-the-world flight.
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/ 19 December 2004
It is news guaranteed to make many Republicans squirm. Was Abraham Lincoln, founder of the party now seeking a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the United States, actually gay himself? A new book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by CA Tripp, certainly thinks so.
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/ 17 December 2004
An internet virus disguised as an electronic greeting card was spreading on Thursday across the world, duping e-mail users with a ”Merry Christmas” message that automatically appears in their native language. The Zafi-D virus infected 10% of e-mail on the net, according to anti-virus firm Sophos.
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/ 17 December 2004
United States scientists have tested a handgun that can only be used by its owner. Sensors embedded in the handle recognise the owner’s grip, so if the pistol is grabbed by an unauthorised user it should refuse to fire. The New Jersey Institute of Technology developed the system called dynamic grip recognition.
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/ 17 December 2004
Hollywood has joined the war. Universal Pictures announced on Thursday that it is to make The Battle for Fallujah. To prove it is serious, it has enlisted Indiana Jones himself, actor Harrison Ford, to help defeat the insurgency. The film — Hollywood’s first foray into the second Iraq conflict — is due to go into production next year.
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/ 16 December 2004
The United States religious right, encouraged by the re-election of President George Bush, has launched a new offensive against secularism during this holiday season, with a campaign to put the Christ back into Christmas. The targets of the conservatives’ wrath include leading department stores and state schools.
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/ 15 December 2004
Two celebrated red-tailed hawks whose eviction from their nest high atop a chic Manhattan building sparked protests from bird watchers will be allowed to rebuild their home in the same spot. But despite the agreement on Tuesday, all was not calm outside 927 Fifth Avenue.
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/ 15 December 2004
Hollywood movie studios on Tuesday sued scores of operators of United States- and European-based computer servers that help relay digitised movie files across online file-sharing networks. The copyright infringement suits expand on a new US film industry initiative whose initial targets were individual file-swappers.
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/ 15 December 2004
Two friends are at a party when one sees a potential love interest. The other friend swoops into action, making an introduction and helping to keep the conversation going — all so the buddy can score a phone number. But now, those who ride shotgun for the sake of love have a name. They are dating’s "wingmen" and "wingwomen".
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/ 14 December 2004
The United States’s trade deficit swelled to an all-time high of ,5-billion in October as imports — including those from China — surged to the loftiest levels on record. Skyrocketing crude-oil prices also contributed to the yawning trade gap. The trade imbalance widened by a sizable 8,9% in October from the previous month.
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/ 14 December 2004
Internet search giant Google announced plans on Tuesday to digitise the contents of millions of library books and make them searchable online. The Silicon Valley firm said it is working with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library.
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/ 14 December 2004
An 80-year-old diver, Ignacio Siberio, was rescued after spending about 20 hours clinging to a buoy after his boat went adrift off the Florida Keys. Siberio, a Cuban-born lawyer, was spear-fishing on Saturday, as he has done most weekends for six decades, when his boat’s anchor line broke and drifted away.
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/ 14 December 2004
A white judge who wore blackface make-up, handcuffs and a jail jumpsuit at a Halloween party will be suspended for six months, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled on Monday. The justices voted 5-2 to suspend Judge Timothy Ellender for a year without pay for dishonouring his position, but to defer half of that penalty.