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/ 30 January 2006
Qatari Energy Minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah joined a growing chorus of voices on Monday calling for the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) to leave production levels unchanged ahead of a meeting in Vienna on Tuesday. He said current high crude prices prevent any lowering of the cartel’s production level.
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/ 25 January 2006
Wish you could get Mozart on the phone? No problem — and you won’t even have to part with a coin to compose the call. Fifty bright red "Calling Mozart" booths went up around Vienna on Wednesday, two days before Austria celebrates the 250th anniversary of his birth.
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/ 18 January 2006
German ”tax refugees” dodging tough new banking laws at home are taking billions of euros across the border and depositing them in Austrian banks, said the newspaper Die Presse on Wednesday. The Banking Cooperative Federation in Germany’s Bavaria state estimated that last year alone, two billion euros (,4-billion) had flowed from its member-banks to Austria.
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/ 17 January 2006
An Austrian arbitration court ruled on Tuesday that five paintings by Austrian art nouveau painter Gustav Klimt seized by the Nazis should be returned to their owner’s family. The court ruled that "conditions have been met for the five paintings to be given back to the heirs to Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer".
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/ 16 January 2006
Two Syrian intelligence officers began giving evidence in Vienna again on Monday to the United Nations commission investigating the murder 11 months ago of Lebanese former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, a Syrian diplomat said. They are Syria’s former head of intelligence in Lebanon, Rustom Ghazale, and his deputy, retired colonel Samih Kashaami.
Oil prices rose on Monday, hovering above a barrel, and natural-gas futures dropped amid a mild start to winter in the United States. Gasoline prices also eased, but analysts suggested that relatively mild US temperatures would keep demand high and stocks tight.
Austrian United Nations anti-torture envoy Manfred Nowak in an interview published on Monday warned that societies must not put God above human rights. ”If one accepts that divine law is higher than international law, we can close shop,” said Nowak in the Vienna newspaper Kurier.
Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountaineer and writer with a Nazi past who fled a British prisoner-of-war camp in India for the northern Himalayas, where he befriended and tutored the Dalai Lama, died on Saturday. He was 93. Actor Brad Pitt played Harrer in the film Seven Years in Tibet.
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/ 26 December 2005
Austria will celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth next year in what promises to be an extravaganza for souvenir hunters. ”The ‘Mozart’ brand is one of the best known in the world,” said Arthur Oberascher, head of the Austrian National Tourist Office, estimating its value at about €5,4-billion.
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/ 22 December 2005
A man who used an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler as the greeting on his cellphone answering service went on trial on Thursday in Austria, where such statements are a crime. The 20-year-old defendant, whose name was not released in line with privacy laws, was being tried in the province of Tyrol.
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/ 22 December 2005
The European Union and Iran still seem to be on a collision course over Tehran’s alleged atomic-weapons intentions despite the revival of talks, diplomats and analysts said on Thursday. The EU and Iran resumed talks on Wednesday, agreeing after five hours to meet again in January.
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/ 21 December 2005
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Wednesday Iran will ”not agree to any conditions whatsoever” for the resumption of talks with the European Union on its controversial nuclear programme. Mottaki said Iran is not interested in ”talks about talks” but in discussing how to keep nuclear technology within the country.
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/ 9 November 2005
The United States and other nations have frozen more than $150-million of "terrorist assets" in the global anti-terrorism fight, a senior US official said on Wednesday. "Key financiers have been detained, over $150-million of terrorist assets have been frozen and millions more blocked in transit or seized at borders," said US State Department counterrorism co-ordinator Henry Crumpton.
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/ 24 October 2005
Crude slid below on Monday as Hurricane Wilma crashed ashore in Florida, avoiding already battered Gulf of Mexico oil-producing and -refining facilities. Analysts said perceptions of relatively plentiful supply and revised assessments showing less damage from previous hurricanes also contributed to the downward trend.
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/ 15 September 2005
Opec has cut its estimate for the expected increase in global oil demand this year for the fifth time in a row, with the increase now expected to be 1,7% from the 2004 figure, its monthly report showed on Thursday. Global demand is now forecast to be an average 83,5-million barrels per day.
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/ 5 September 2005
Oil prices fell on Monday after industrialised nations agreed to release 60-million barrels of crude from their strategic stockpiles to help avert a severe fuel shortage in the United States. The US refinery system is struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina.
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/ 2 September 2005
The United Nations atomic watchdog was on Friday finalising a report expected to say that Iran has failed to suspend nuclear fuel work and which could trigger UN Security Council sanctions over fears Tehran is developing nuclear weapons, diplomats said. ”As far as we know, they have not suspended [nuclear fuel work],” a diplomat said.
Europe’s weather crisis eased on Thursday as fires were put out in Portugal and flood waters receded in central Europe, but the death toll rose in Romania and Austria after heavy rains. Since June, the flooding in central and eastern Europe has caused 103 deaths, while fires in drought-stricken Portugal, Spain and France killed 37.
Oil futures held above a barrel on Tuesday amid lingering global supply concerns despite resumed crude flows from Ecuador and Nigeria. The rise came amid expectations that Wednesday’s United States petroleum inventories will show declines in both crude and gasoline stocks with little indication that high prices are slowing demand.
Amid intense diplomacy, Britain, France and Germany circulated a draft resolution on Tuesday, ahead of a key meeting of the United Nations atomic watchdog, urging Iran to stop nuclear fuel work that has raised concerns of a possible weapons programme. But diplomats warned the tactic is running into opposition.
The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency said on Monday he regrets that Iran began conversion activities before the agency’s surveillance system could be tested on site. Iran on Monday resumed uranium conversion at its nuclear facility in Isfahan.
Vienna’s Leopold Museum has invited the public to come in the nude on Friday to view an exhibition of erotic works by Austrian masters such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, a spokesperson said on Wednesday. The exhibition is titled <i>The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals</i>.
Oil prices swung sharply upward on Friday as traders shrugged off the shock of the London bomb blasts and focused on a drop in United States crude stocks and possible supply disruptions because of Hurricane Dennis. Light, sweet crude for August delivery was up 84 cents at ,57 a barrel by midday in Europe.
Production of cannabis, the most commonly used street drug in the world, has jumped by around 25% in one year, the United Nations said in a report Wednesday. An estimated 161-million people used cannabis in 2003, equivalent to four percent of the global population between the ages of 15 and 64.
They size you up, offer you a hand, raise and lower the seat and flush when you’re finished. Researchers at Vienna’s Technical University have begun production on what they’ve dubbed a ”toilet with brains” — a high-tech commode designed to help multiple-sclerosis patients and other disabled or elderly people.
North Korea may have enough weapons-grade plutonium to make up to half a dozen nuclear bombs, the head of the United Nations atomic agency said on Sunday in another warning about the regime’s secretive nuclear programme. He described the latest developments as a ”cry for help” on Pyongyang’s part.
Crude futures rose on Monday ahead of a meeting between United States President George Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah that will focus in part on possible ways to bring down high oil prices. Analysts said that a rash of refinery outages in the US and Venezuela underpinned the bullish market.
Oil prices rose on Thursday as traders digested United States government figures showing a large increase in crude inventories but a drop in gasoline stocks ahead of the driving season. Light, sweet crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange was up 15 cents at ,14 a barrel by midday in Europe.
Austrian authorities are investigating whether a university committed a crime when it used corpses as part of research to develop better crash-test dummies, a prosecutor said on Tuesday. Authorities suspect that researchers at the Technical University of Graz might have violated the dignity of the dead by using bodies in tests.
Africa remains the world’s weak spot in the fight against drugs because most countries on the continent lack the means to combat trafficking, the International Narcotics Control Board has warned. It said while cannabis remains ”a major issue of concern” throughout Africa, the trade in cocaine and heroin was also on the rise.
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/ 27 January 2005
Fouling traffic and tempers, heavy snow fell on Thursday on much of Europe that had been spared winter’s full fury for weeks, giving Rome and the Mediterranean island of Mallorca a rare white blanket and playing havoc with Switzerland’s famously efficient trains. In Switzerland, winds of 172kph were clocked on Wednesday.
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/ 11 January 2005
Bears in Slovakia are awakening early from hibernation. So are barmaids in Bavaria, unseasonably busy in outdoor beer gardens. Forgoing a white Christmas was one thing, but the utter absence of snow for weeks on end has many Europeans pining for what seems — so far, anyway — like The Winter That Wasn’t.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=BreakingNews-InternationalNews&ao=177751">Europe’s storm toll rises to 17</a>