Canada
#1 — CBC | Swiss bus crash driver blames motorbike
The driver of a tour bus that crashed in Switzerland on Saturday, killing two Canadians, says he was trying to avoid a motorcyclist.
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#2 — CBC | Afghan insurgency will dissolve rather than be broken: new Canadian commander
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Canada’s new top soldier in Afghanistan says he believes the insurgency in Afghanistan will dissolve into irrelevance if this year’s operation against the Taliban is successful.
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#3 — NP | MacNair: B.C. Liberal chooses voters over HST
Gordon Campbell is staying the course with the SS Titanic, otherwise known as the HST, despite such widespread unpopularity that the petition seeking to block the tax has more than 620,000 signatures. That’s 130,000 shy of the total number of voters who gave the Liberal Party their third consecutive majority government in May of 2009, and there’s still over three weeks left to collect signatures.
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#4 — OC | Police find woman’s body in Vancouver park where Wendy Ladner-Beaudry was murdered
Police found a woman’s body Saturday night in the same Vancouver park where 53-year-old Wendy Ladner-Beaudry was brutally murdered last April.
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#5 — OC | Liberals play HST shell game
An honest summary of the province’s new HST would read something like this: we wanted to give businesses a huge tax break because it’s good for the economy so we’re going to stick you with the bill by making you pay more for a whole bunch of stuff.
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After he took 30 Valium and downed a bottle of whisky, Richard Fry stumbled into a Shoppers Drug Mart in search of OxyContin. He can’t recall the rest.
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#7 — MG | Harper pressured to put climate change on G8, G20 agenda
OTTAWA — It was described by Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a “sideshow,” but international leaders are mounting pressure on the Canadian government to include climate change as a major issue on the agenda at upcoming G8 and G20 economic summits in Huntsville, Ont., and Toronto.
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#8 — Star | The Ontario no G20 or G8 leader will see
SANDY LAKE, ONT.—Precious Kakegamic couldn’t be farther removed from the $1.1 billion G8 and G20 summits and their global agenda.
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World
#9 — BBC | Tens of thousands flee ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan
Escalating ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan has prompted tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks to flee the country.
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Fox | Worst ethnic violence in 20 years
Telegraph | Kyrgyzstan violence: British and US governments prepare evacuation of citizens
#10 — Fox | Van Der Sloot Willing to Tell Where Holloway’s Buried in Exchange for Transfer to Aruba
Dutch murder suspect Joran van der Sloot says he’ll reveal the location of U.S. teen Natalee Holloway’s body if authorities transfer him from Peru’s most infamous prison to a jail in Aruba, Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports Sunday.
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#11 — Fox | Lawmakers Face Obstacles in Banking Reform
WASHINGTON — From big banks’ exotic trades to the credit cards in people’s wallets, a few contentious issues could upend a delicate political equilibrium as U.S. lawmakers try to blend House and Senate bills into a single rewrite of banking regulations.
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#12 — NY Times | Honda Replaces Strikers in China
ZHONGSHAN, China — Striking workers at a Honda auto parts factory here in southeastern China have won higher wages — but not necessarily for themselves.
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Ministers are considering drastic cuts to prison budgets that could see thousands of criminals out on the streets instead of behind bars, it emerged today.
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#14 — Times | Defence chief to be axed
BRITAIN’S most senior military officer is to be axed as the new government seeks to draw a line under past failures in Afghanistan.
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#15 — Times | Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice stripped of police bodyguards
THE daughters of Prince Andrew are to be stripped of their round-the-clock police protection after a long-running row about the £500,000 annual cost of their bodyguards.
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#16 — Times | Revealed: Japan’s bribes on whaling
A SUNDAY TIMES investigation has exposed Japan for bribing small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales.
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#17 — Times | Germany seeks extradition of alleged Mossad agent arrested in Warsaw
The arrest of a suspected Mossad agent in Warsaw is threatening to disrupt relations between Israel and two of its closest allies in the EU, Poland and Germany.
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#18 — Times | Blogger Sayeed Valadbaygi who alerted world to Iran’s brutal crackdown flees to London
THE blogger who sent the image of Neda Agha-Soltan, the dying protester, around the world a year ago said yesterday he was so overwhelmed by the brutality of Tehran’s crackdown that he had no idea she would become an icon of opposition to the Iranian regime.
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#19 — Times | Inside the Pimpernel’s bunker
There was little to arouse suspicion about the group of conspirators who converged on a rented house in Reykjavik on a blustery day three months ago. Their leader, Julian Assange, hid his striking shock of white hair beneath a grey snowsuit and his words to the property’s owner were blandly reassuring: “We are journalists. We’re here to write about the volcano.”
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#20 — Telegraph | Iran’s Revolutionary Guards cash in after a year of suppressing dissent
Iran’s hardline Revolutionary Guards have been rewarded with multi-billion dollar business contracts as payback for helping to suppress the mass protests that convulsed the country a year ago.
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#21 — Telegraph | Absinthe could be legalised in France after 100-year ban
Absinthe, the mind-bending green spirit said to have inspired Vincent van Gogh, could be legalised in France almost a century after being deemed a public menace.
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