DEFIANT: North Korea yesterday said it would hold off talks over its nuclear program until Washington changes its `hostile' policy toward the hermetic country
The key players in international efforts to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions are picking up the pace in what has become a protracted ritual of talking about talks and discussing how to entice the North's recalcitrant government back into negotiations.

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SERIOUS CONCERNS: Officials in the storm-ravaged north of the country say already small stocks of relief goods are dwindling and they need food and medicine
Helicopters delivered food to famished survivors and picked up casualties as the weather cleared yesterday in villages ravaged by back-to-back storms that left 640 people dead and nearly 400 missing in the northern Philippines.

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Miss Peru Maria Julia Mantilla Garcia is crowned Miss World 2005 in the southern Chinese city of Sanya.

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A medical expert has warned that the next flu pandemic could wreck the global ecosystem, in addition to killing millions of people worldwide, a newspaper reported yesterday.

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CRISIS: Reports that the Tutsi-led Rwandan government has sent troops across the the border into Congo in search of Hutu rebels could lead to another regional war
The MI-17 helicopter rocks and shudders into life, the rotors accelerating until flight UN863 is airborne and skimming the rooftops of Goma for another mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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Albanian politicians appointed a former guerrilla leader and war crimes suspect as prime minister on Friday in a parliamentary vote.

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A record-breaking, US$100 million clergy sex abuse settlement between the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange and 87 plaintiffs brought some measure of relief to long-suffering families, but legal experts differed over whether the blockbuster deal would help resolve a huge backlog of cases in California.

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The militant group Hamas will accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and a long-term truce with Israel, a leader said Friday, apparently softening Hamas' hardline stance and boosting hopes for renewed peace efforts after Yasser Arafat's death.

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MEGATRAFFICKING: The head of the powerful Cali drug cartel was taken from prison, put on a plane and flown to the US to stand trial for cocaine trafficking
Drug kingpin Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, wearing handcuffs and a bulletproof vest, was put aboard a US government plane Friday night and flown to the United States for trial, becoming the most powerful Colombian trafficker to ever be extradited to America.

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ART NABBERS: When a gallery worker reached for the button that unlocked the front door, the men who walked in didn't work for the telephone company
She was expecting a telephone repair crew, so the woman at the desk -- the only person inside the two-room gallery on the Upper East Side known as Adam Williams Fine Art Ltd. -- reached for the button that unlocked the front door. The two men who walked in turned out not to be telephone company employees.

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Seventeen federal, state and local investigators, prosecutors and police officers have been arrested in connection with a string of killings in Cancun as part of a massive effort to sever ties between cocaine smugglers and authorities in this beachside resort, Mexico's top organized-crime and anti-narcotics prosecutor said Friday night.

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Sheriff's investigators with a new search warrant raided Michael Jackson's Neverland estate again, just weeks before the pop star is scheduled to go on trial on charges of child molestation.

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The American sprinter Tim Montgomery was using performance enhancing drugs when he set the coveted 100m world record of 9.78 sec, accused steroid peddler Victor Conte said in an interview broadcast on ABC television's 20/20 program on Friday.

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■ China
Robbers get away in crane
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