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The three Pakistan cricketers at the center of fixing allegations were dropped for the rest of the team's England tour on Thursday, shortly before they appeared for questioning by investigators of the Pakistan Cricket Board.
Team manager Yawar Saeed said bowlers Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir and test captain Salman Butt will not play in the remaining Twenty20 and one-day international matches.
He insisted they had not been suspended.
Saeed said that 13 players will be available for the two Twenty20 matches before three replacements arrive to bolster the squad for the five-match one-day series.
"The T20 squad will remain what it is here this morning, i.e. 13 people," Saeed said in Taunton, where Pakistan was playing a warmup game against English county side Somerset. "When we play the one-day internationals, we will be asking for replacements to make the squad up to 16."
Saeed, who had earlier said the trio would continue playing unless police laid criminal charges ...
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| Posted at 02:37 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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With just 30 days to go before the official opening of the New Delhi Commonwealth Games, organizers continue to struggle with basic preparations like safety certificates for structures and the wherewithal to fight a potential epidemic.
A fourth missed deadline for construction work and a spurt in cases of dengue fever — a mosquito-borne virus — are the latest setbacks to threaten an event already plagued by allegations official of poor building practices and bogus building approvals .
The venues, which were scheduled to be ready by August 31, are now unlikely to completed until September 15, just a day before athletes and officials start arriving for the games Oct. 3-14 games.
Despite the setbacks, chief organizer Suresh Kalmadi is confident the infrastructure will be ready for the games.
"We are getting all the required certificates pertaining to completion, safety and fire and sending them to the Commonwealth Games Federation," Kalmadi said at a media con ...
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| Posted at 02:33 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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China has ordered local leaders to cool a surge in politically sensitive food prices by raising vegetable production amid rising tensions in poor countries over surging food costs.
Mayors were told to make sure local markets have a week's supply of vegetables, said a Cabinet announcement on Friday. It said state banks were told to lend to producers to increase output amid shortages blamed on summer flooding and drought in some areas.
"Making sure of vegetable supplies and price stability is an important task for now and in the future," the Cabinet statement said. "Local governments should manage inflation expectations well and realize the importance and urgency of this."
China's food price inflation spiked to 6.8 percent in July over a year earlier, pushing overall inflation to 3.3 percent, its highest level this year, according to government figures.
Elsewhere, a jump in food prices triggered deadly riots in Mozambique this week and the poor in Asia, the Middle East ...
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| Posted at 02:26 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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Most Asian stock markets climbed Friday as investors took heart from a slight improvement in U.S. economic indicators amid lingering worries over the pace of the global economic recovery.
But gains were modest across the region as investors took a wait-and-see stance ahead of closely-watched U.S. employment figures due out Friday. The jobless rate for August is expected to rise to 9.6 percent from 9.5 percent in July, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters.
Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 stock index rose 26.15 points, or 0.3 percent, to 9,088.99 and South Korea's Kospi edged up 0.2 percent to 1,777.58. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 gained less than 0.1 percent to 4,533.50.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng index added 0.1 percent to 20,882.14. Markets in New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan also advanced. But the Shanghai Composite Index slipped 0.9 percent to 2,633.34.
In New York on Thursday, the Dow Jones industrial average added 50.63 points, or 0.5 percent, to 10,320.1 ...
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| Posted at 02:17 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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South Korea and the United States will hold joint anti-submarine exercises in another show of force against North Korea, officials said Friday, as Pyongyang renewed threats against the drills.
The exercises will be the second in a series of joint maneuvers the allies planned to conduct in response to the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship in March that they blame on the North. The two sides staged large-scale joint naval drills in July followed by South Korea's own naval drills last month.
The drills, set to run from Sunday through Thursday off the Korean peninsula's west coast, will involve about 17,000 U.S. and South Korean troops, seven ships and two submarines as well as aircraft, according to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff and the U.S. military in Seoul.
The exercises are "designed to send a clear message of deterrence to North Korea, while improving overall alliance anti-submarine warfare capabilities," the U.S. military in Seoul said in a statement.
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| Posted at 02:13 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that while the fight against corruption must be led by Afghans, the U.S. is working on new ways to prevent millions of American dollars flowing into the nation from underwriting bribery and graft.
Gates spoke to reporters in the Afghan capital with President Hamid Karzai, who complained about the tactics of two Western-backed anti-corruption units that recently arrested one of his top aides on suspicion of bribery, likening them to heavy-handed Soviet tactics.
The U.S. views the arrest of Mohammed Zia Salehi as a test of Karzai's willingness to take on graft in his government.
Salehi was arrested by Afghan police after allegedly being wiretapped discussing a bribe. He called Karzai from his jail cell in July and was freed hours later.
Soon afterward Karzai blasted the work of the U.S.-backed corruption investigators involved in that case and review how they operate.
"The key here is that the fight against corruption ne ...
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| Posted at 02:10 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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Afghan President Hamid Karzai reassured nervous customers at the troubled Kabul Bank on Thursday, saying every penny of their deposits would be guaranteed by the government.
Larger than usual crowds gathered to withdraw funds from Afghanistan's largest bank Wednesday and Thursday after two top executives resigned amid allegations of mismanagement and unorthodox real estate loans.
"The Kabul Bank is safe," Karzai said in a news conference with visiting U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal echoed that message, saying that fears about the stability of Kabul Bank had not sparked a "crisis" at Kabul Bank.
"We are 100 percent sure that Kabul Bank is safe," Zakhilwal said. "I, as finance minister, am giving you my guarantee that your money is safe — if it's one Afghani, one dollar, one euro, up to millions. ... Kabul Bank is not in danger."
Afghan television stations broadcast remarks Wednesday night from the central bank governo ...
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| Posted at 02:04 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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NATO said an airstrike in northern Afghanistan killed about a dozen insurgents, but President Hamid Karzai said the victims were campaign workers seeking votes in this month's parliamentary elections.
NATO said its airstrike on a car in northern Takhar province's normally quiet Rustaq district killed or wounded as many as 12 insurgents on Thursday, including a Taliban commander and a local head of an allied insurgent group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, responsible for attacks in Kabul and elsewhere.
However Karzai — who repeatedly warns that civilian casualties undermine anti-insurgency efforts — said the airstrike had killed 10 campaign workers instead.
"The rationale for the airstrike still needs to be fully investigated," the president said at a joint news conference in Kabul with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Gates said he had not heard about civilian casualties, but said the attack had hit its intended target and promised an investigatio ...
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| Posted at 02:02 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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An Australian man was attacked by a shark in the waters off a remote island resort in the Solomon Islands, officials said Friday.
The 34-year-old from New South Wales state suffered lacerations to the face and neck in the Thursday attack, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in a statement. He was in stable condition at a hospital in the capital Honiara.
The nation of 600,000 people is scattered across 992 small islands in the central Pacific. Solomon Islanders mostly live on subsistence agriculture and fishing.Associated Press ...
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| Posted at 02:00 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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Six recruiters were accused Thursday of luring 400 laborers from Thailand to the United States and forcing them to work, according to a federal indictment that the FBI called the largest human-trafficking case ever charged in U.S. history.
The indictment alleges that the scheme was orchestrated by four employees of labor recruiting company Global Horizons Manpower Inc. and two Thailand-based recruiters. It said the recruiters lured the workers with false promises of lucrative jobs, then confiscated their passports, failed to honor their employment contracts and threatened to deport them.
Once the Thai laborers arrived in the United States starting in May 2004, they were put to work and have since been sent to sites in states including Hawaii, Washington, California, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah, according to attorneys and advocates.
Many laborers were initially taken to farms in Hawaii and Washing ...
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| Posted at 01:57 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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A key independent lawmaker accused the leaders of Australia's two main political parties of attempting to buy power Friday as they battle to form the nation's first minority government since World War II.
Bob Katter is one of a trio of lawmakers with the power to make either the center-left Labor Party or the conservative Liberal Party-led coalition Australia's next government, after Aug. 21 election failed to deliver either side a majority.
He likened the leaders' wooing of independents to prostitution.
His criticism followed Thursday's decision by a fourth independent, Andrew Wilkie, to support Prime Minister Julia Gillard's Labor Party, rebuffing a 1 billion Australian dollar ($910 million) offer for a new local hospital from opposition leader local Tony Abbott if his Liberal Party-led coalition formed government.
Gillard offered Wilkie an immediate AU$100 million for a hospital upgrade plus a potential AU$240 million for further construction at the hospital.
"We' ...
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| Posted at 01:53 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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An Indonesian volcano sent a new, powerful burst of hot ash high into the air early Friday, violently shaking homes and trees along the slopes and sending panicked villagers scurrying back to safety.
"This was a big one!" said 37-year-old Anto Sembiring, who fled his coffee shop not far from the crater's mouth, joining hundreds of others gathered near Mount Sinabung's base. "It shot up at least 3,000 meters (yards)."
The air was thick with the smell of sulfur and visibility was limited to just a few yards (meters).
Mount Sinabung erupted for the first time in four centuries on Sunday and Monday, catching many scientists off guard and forcing at least 30,000 people living along its fertile slopes in North Sumatra province to be evacuated.
In recent days, as the mountain quieted, many had returned home to tend to their dust-covered crops and to reopen small businesses, despite warnings by vulcanologists that the alert level was still high.
The eruption Friday, which sta ...
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| Posted at 01:45 PM, Sep 03, 2010 |
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