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/ 14 December 2004
World crude oil prices rose on Monday as traders worried about heating oil supplies in anticipation of a plunge in temperatures in the northeastern United States. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in January, climbed 30 cents to ,01 a barrel.
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/ 12 December 2004
For more than a decade, the Fifth Avenue hawks have brought a touch of the wild to Manhattan’s concrete canyons. The raptors that captured the hearts of a city inspired a documentary, a book and reams of newsprint. But now the residents who shared their building with the red-tailed hawks have destroyed their nest.
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/ 12 December 2004
The American religious right, emboldened by its spreading influence in the Republican party and an explosive growth in the number of evangelical Christians, has launched a major push to get an alternative to evolution — which they believe denies the biblical version of God’s creation of the world — into the classroom.
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/ 11 December 2004
Giant, inflatable advertising figures of SpongeBob SquarePants have become a coveted item among United States thieves and cost a worker her job in a dispute with a Burger King in Florida. The balloon figures, 3m tall, promote the SpongeBob SquarePants film and can be seen atop Burger King restaurants.
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/ 11 December 2004
He is most famous for his far-fetched tale of how dinosaurs could be brought to life with DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber. Now the bestselling author Michael Crichton has written a thriller about ecoterrorism that the critics say is equally fantastic in its refusal to accept that global warming is a clear and present danger.
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/ 10 December 2004
In a victory for rebellious teenagers, the Seattle Supreme Court has ruled that a mother violated Washington’s privacy law by eavesdropping on her daughter’s phone conversation. Privacy advocates applauded the Thursday ruling, but the mother was unrepentant.
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/ 10 December 2004
Digital music players have gotten smaller and sexier this holiday season, hidden in gold necklaces, tucked into sweaters, and squeezed into earpieces for swimmers. The market for flash cards that store everything from text and photos to music has blossomed this holiday shopping season, with companies offering ever more novel products in the fiercely competitive digital music business.
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/ 21 November 2004
A new computer worm is wiggling its way through the internet. Computer antivirus companies Symantec and H+BEDV are warning their customers of the existence of a MyDoom variant known as Worm/MyDoom.AH. The worm is a threat to anyone using the Microsoft Windows operating system.
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/ 20 November 2004
Violet-eyed Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor is suffering from congestive heart failure and crippling spinal problems, but the movie icon says she is not afraid of death. The star (72), once hailed as the world’s most beautiful woman, revealed in a rare interview that she is once again staring death in the face.
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/ 20 November 2004
Alan Greenspan, United States Federal Reserve chairperson, on Friday gave the dollar a further push lower as he said the huge US current-account deficit threatens to scare off foreign investors. His comments followed remarks from the US Treasury Secretary, John Snow, that poured cold water on the idea of intervention to support the greenback.
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/ 17 November 2004
Musical legend Lionel Richie’s estranged wife was behind bars on Tuesday for allegedly allowing her boyfriend to turn her bathroom into an illegal cosmetic-surgery clinic, officials said. The boyfriend allegedly injected patients in her Beverly Hills bathroom with anti-wrinkle drugs that are not approved by United States drug regulators.
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/ 17 November 2004
A 10-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich a Florida woman says bears the image of the Virgin Mary was back on eBay on Tuesday after the internet auction house initially cancelled bids that went up to $22 000. Owner Diana Duyser (52), of Hollywood, Florida, insists the miraculously mould-free snack is not a scam.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=BreakingNews-Andinothernews&ao=125635">EBay chokes on cheesy miracle</a>
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/ 17 November 2004
Forget about dancing genies, buxom harem girls and dashing heroes in mythical Arab lands bent on saving ravishing princesses. In this animated movie, the issue is one of divine love. But <i>Muhammad: The Last Prophet</i> — a two-year, $10-million undertaking — is more than a 90-minute cartoon chronicling the life of Islam’s founding prophet, say its producers and distributors.
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/ 16 November 2004
The Christmas-themed movie <i>Noel</i> most likely won’t be coming to a theatre near you — but if you miss it on cable, there’s always the self-destructing DVD. They look and play like normal DVDs, except that their playable surface is dark red. Each disc contains a chemical time-bomb that begins ticking once it’s exposed to air.
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/ 16 November 2004
The people at eBay were no believers in this cheesy miracle: half of a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich whose owner claimed it bore the image of the Virgin Mary. Diana Duyser put the sandwich up for sale last week, drawing bids as high as 000 before eBay pulled the item on Sunday night.
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/ 15 November 2004
Colin Powell, a son of Jamaican immigrants, became a United States war hero who soldiered on as the chief US diplomat presenting the case for the Iraq invasion to a sceptical world community. Now the 65th Secretary of State has resigned from President George Bush’s administration.
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/ 15 November 2004
”Which country in South Africa?” asked the American, upon learning the home country of the visitor with the strange accent. ”Oh, yes,” he said, as a light of recognition flickered in his elderly eyes. ”Isn’t that the home base of that delightful Negro person who spent all those years in jail?”
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/ 15 November 2004
Colin Powell has resigned as American Secretary of State, the department said on Monday. Powell (67), a former general, submitted his resignation to President George Bush on Friday, a senior department official said. The White House will announce the resignations of four members of Bush’s Cabinet on Monday, a spokesperson said.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=BreakingNews-InternationalNews&ao=125591">Colin Powell: A ‘great American story'</a>
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/ 12 November 2004
Men’s advocacy groups throughout the United States are up in arms over a television commercial for cellphones that portrays fathers as dumb and dispensable. It shows a father perplexed by his small daughter’s homework before being humiliated and dispatched from the kitchen by the exasperated child and mother.
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/ 12 November 2004
Four former Microsoft employees were charged with stealing ,4-million worth of software and selling it on the side. According to the complaint filed on Monday, the employees ordered software available to Microsoft employees for free to use for business purposes, then sold it to online software retailers.
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/ 11 November 2004
Microsoft launched its own internet search engine on Thursday in a move aimed at challenging market leaders Google and Yahoo. The move marks a new strategy for Microsoft, which up to now has relied on the underlying technology of Yahoo and others for its MSN Search.
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/ 9 November 2004
Amazon.com said that its website experienced slowdowns for much of the day on Monday but was running normally by the evening. Spokesperson Patty Smith said the world’s largest internet retailer began experiencing ”a slowness” around 8.30am (4.30pm GMT), causing problems for some customers trying to access the website or buy items.
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/ 8 November 2004
It’s literally because he has an answer for everything that Ken Jennings is now rich and famous, having broken world records in a game-show winning streak that has Americans holding their breath. Jennings has won more than 65 games and correctly answered more than 2 000 questions since his first appearance on Jeopardy!.
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/ 1 November 2004
American voters may have shrugged off a surprise appearance by Osama bin Laden, but one day ahead of the United States presidential election, daily newspapers conveyed a general pessimism about the election, no matter who wins.
With final opinion polls searching for any late shift in voter sentiment, neither candidate was seen as breaking out of a suffocating deadlock ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
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/ 30 October 2004
Two United States television networks are squaring off to produce a miniseries dramatising the September 11 2001 terror attacks, based on the report of the federal commission that investigated the event. NBC Entertainment has joined forces with Graham Yost, producer-writer of <i>Band of Brothers</i>, for the project.
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/ 27 October 2004
New York’s main crude oil contract plummeted on Wednesday as traders were swept with relief by news of a surge in United States commercial crude oil inventories. Light sweet crude for delivery in December plunged to a low of a barrel and was trading late in the morning at ,65, still down ,52.
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/ 25 October 2004
After almost two million ballots were discounted in 2000 in a presidential election that was decided by 537 votes in Florida, this year’s United States election should be far more accurate, USA Today reported on Monday, citing better ballot design, new voting machines and voter education.
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/ 22 October 2004
Whoever wins the United States election, nuance has become a no-no this year, bludgeoned by campaign attack ads and each side’s distortion of the other’s positions. Nuance, a trait most often associated with John Kerry and rarely with President George Bush, now is taken to mean flip-flop, wishy-washiness or appeasement.
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/ 14 October 2004
The heirs of a victim of Germany’s Nazi rule on Wednesday sued screen icon Elizabeth Taylor for ownership of a Van Gogh painting they claim rightfully belongs to them. The South African and Canadian descendants of a Jewish woman who fled Germany in the late 1930s say the actress should have known the painting had been stolen by the Nazis.