INDIFFERENT: Middle-class drivers in 107 municipalities around the country ignored an injunction to leave their vehicles at home in favor of shopping and touring as usual
More than 100 Chinese cities including Beijing staged a "Car Free Day" yesterday to fight congestion and pollution, but the streets of the capital remained defiantly clogged by traffic jams.

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China's government has raised fines and increased police powers under a new rule intended to improve crowd control at sports events, festivals at temples and other popular public activities less than one year before the Beijing Olympics.

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Rescuers found two survivors from a missing canoe expedition on Friday, 20 days after the six-member Russian group failed to make a rendezvous in western China, Chinese and Russian reports said.

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DEADLY: Despite Tehran's denial that it provides powerful explosives to rebels, the chief of the US Central Command is suggesting border interdiction may be needed
A top US commander on Friday accused Iran of supplying powerful roadside bombs to militants in Afghanistan, as a suicide car bomb in the capital killed a French soldier and an Afghan bystander.

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A Buddhist group that says it is aiding monks in leading an escalating protest movement in Myanmar called yesterday for nationwide prayer vigils in a bid to turn up the heat on the military regime.

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INSULT? : Defying an emergency rule ban on public demonstrations, thousands of angry protesters chanted slogans demanding the execution of a newspaper editor
Street clashes broke out in Bangladesh on Friday as Islamic activists defied emergency rule to protest over a major newspaper's publication of a cartoon deemed offensive to Muslims.

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Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has urged lawmakers to back President Pervez Musharraf's bid for re-election, claiming it would strengthen Pakistan's democracy, a government statement said yesterday.

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Communal unrest in southern Nepal is worsening and authorities need to act quickly to prevent all-out violence in the ethnically tense region, police and rights activists said on Friday.

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DISASTROUS FLOODS: Besides immediate issues of survival, the floods will have a lasting effect on food supplies because so many crops have been washed away
Aid agencies were appealing for millions of dollars on Friday to help more than 1 million Africans affected by deadly floods that have swept across the continent.

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Threats and economic sanctions will not stop Iran's technological progress, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned yesterday at a large parade featuring fighter jets and radar-avoiding missiles designed to show off the country's military might.

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The former head of a district in Chechnya has been charged as an accomplice in organizing the execution-style murder of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, his lawyer said on Friday.

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SUICIDE BOMBER: The bomb attack wounded six Algerians, two French and an Italian, and came after a call for an offensive against French and Spanish targets
Al-Qaeda's branch in North Africa claimed responsibility on Friday for a suicide bombing in Algeria that wounded two French people and one Italian, hours after it had threatened French targets in the region.

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EBOLA ALERT: The latest suspected cases came from the village of Mwene Ditu, more than 300km from the village of Kampungu -- the site of the confirmed cases
Medical officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo suspect that an Ebola outbreak has spread from the spot where the disease was first identified to a neighboring province, officials said on Friday.

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PLEA AGREEMENT: Two former Blackwater employees who pleaded guilty early this year to possession of stolen firearms are reportedly cooperating with investigators
Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled weapons into Iraq that might have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a US-designated terror organization, US officials said.

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In a disappointing setback, a promising experimental AIDS vaccine failed to work in a large international test, leading the developer to halt the study.

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Two students were shot and wounded at Delaware State University, prompting administrators mindful of the massacre at Virginia Tech to order a swift shutdown of the campus while police searched for the gunman.

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FOREST ENVY: Brazil's president recommended the world stop coveting the country's jungles and take steps to replant the Earth's lost tree resources
Brazil will spend US$270 million over the next three years to create new Indian reservations and bring water and electricity to remote Amazon communities, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Friday.

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Columbia University is providing Iran's president with a forum for his "hate speech" and should withdraw its invitation to have Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak at the prestigious university, the head of New York City Council said on Thursday.

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■ CHINA
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