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DUBAI - THE Gulf kingdom of Bahrain resumed torturing detainees in 2007 after about a decade of not engaging in the 'scourge,' US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released Monday.
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RAMALLAH, West Bank -Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has agreed in principle to indirect talks with Israel under US mediation but has requested a number of guarantees, a Palestinian official said Monday.
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ABU DHABI — Under the watchful eyes of a white-coated doctor, two orderlies in scrubs sedate the patient on a paper-covered stainless steel table, then begin the procedure -- trimming her vital hunting tools.
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DAMASCUS - Syria will support Lebanon in the event of any attack from Israel, President Bashar al-Assad told the speaker of Beirut's parliament on Sunday, the official SANA news agency reported.
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CAIRO - Egyptian authorities swooped on the country's biggest and most powerful opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, before dawn on Monday, arresting 13 members including the group's deputy chief and two other leaders, the movement said.
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AMMAN - Preparations to host the third round of the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC), which will kick off April 1-3 from the spectacular Oval Plaza in Jerash, are on track.
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AMMAN - Several Jordan Valley crops sustained moderate damage last weekend after temperatures dipped below zero degrees, a government official said on Sunday.
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AMMAN –– The Electricity Regulatory Commission (ERC) has added a new surcharge to electricity bills to account for changes in fuel prices, according to an ERC official.
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AMMAN- The government on Sunday decided to cancel the Tawjihi (General Secondary Certificate Exam) electronic results which were erroneously posted yesterday on various websites.
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GAZA– Hamas's Palestinian rivals denounced the Islamist movement on Saturday for expressing regret over the deaths of Israeli civilians during the Gaza war a year ago.
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RIYADH - A senior Saudi diplomat said Sunday his handshake with Israel's deputy foreign minister at a Munich security conference was no step toward recognition of Israel.
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WASHINGTON — The Iranian nuclear threat is real but the United States faces an even greater danger from Al-Qaeda, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned in an interview Sunday.
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TEL AVIV - Human Rights Watch said on Sunday that Israel has failed to properly investigate alleged crimes committed during last winter's devastating Gaza war as demanded by the United Nations.
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SANAA - From the Shiite rebellion in Saada in the north to the surge of secessionist movement in the south and the dangerous alliance forged between tribes and Al-Qaeda in the east, one factor unites analyses of the forces pulling Yemen apart: the failure of its economy.
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Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than US$2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists revealed this week.
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AMMAN - Candidates in the upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections will start campaigning for the support of Iraqi citizens residing in the Kingdom as of Sunday, Iraq Ambassador to Jordan Saad Hayyani said on Thursday.
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WASHINGTON- In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee today, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told representatives that American citizens can be assassinated by the US government when they are overseas.
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TEL AVIV - Extremist Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Thursday warned that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would lose the war and his power if he battled Israel.
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AITA SHAAB, Lebanon - More than three years after the last war between Israel and Hezbollah, south Lebanon residents are bracing for new conflict amid Israeli warnings against both Hezbollah and Syria.
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SANAA - Shiite rebels in north Yemen said on Thursday 14 people, including women and children, had been killed by Saudi warplanes more than a week after the group pulled out of Saudi territory on the border.
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BAGHDAD — Iraq's premier has convened parliament for Sunday to debate what his government branded an "illegal" decision to reinstate election candidates with alleged links to ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
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TEHRAN — A senior Iranian military official told Gulf states on Thursday not to squander money on US missiles, boasting that Iran can render them useless, the state news agency IRNA reported.
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AMMAN - Authorities on Wednesday announced a state of maximum alert to address weather-related emergencies as snow and heavy rainfall were expected in different parts of the country starting in the morning hours of Thursday.
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The Saudi Civil & Political Rights Association (ACPRA) threatened to resort to the UN Human Rights Council to establish a fact-finding committee in order to investigate the Saudi Interior Ministry’s “human right violations” for the last thirty years in a statement sent to King Abdullah.
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LONDON - More than 15,000 people have rushed to visit a recently opened exhibition at London’s Science Museum. Launched on the 21st January, the landmark exhibition highlights the scientific heritage the world has inherited from Muslim civilisation.
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LONDON - A best-selling Brazilian author branded Tony Blair a 'war criminal' Monday for his role in the Iraq war, following the former British Prime Minister's appointment as an advisor to the Olympic Games in Brazil.
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TEHRAN - Iran said on Tuesday it would soon hang nine more rioters over the unrest that erupted after the June presidential vote, and the leader of the opposition said such repression showed the 1979 Islamic revolution had failed.
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HERZLIYA, Israel - Israel must begin to "roll back" its occupation of the Palestinian territories to convince Palestinians it wants a peace deal that would give them statehood, the Palestinian prime minister said on Tuesday.
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AMMAN - Opposition parties on Tuesday did not attend a meeting with Political Development Minister Musa Maaytah in protest against the “one person, one vote” electoral system.
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AMMAN - Iraqi authorities on Tuesday said Baghdad is willing to activate an agreement that allows for the extradition of Jordanian prisoners in Iraq to spend the rest of their imprisonment terms in Jordan, Iraqi Ambassador in Amman Saad Hayyani said.
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AMMAN - The government on Tuesday charged that a report issued this week by Human Rights Watch (HRW) is “100 per cent politically oriented”.
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AMMAN –– A group of prospective investors in the Kingdom’s agricultural mega-project in Sudan are due in Amman next week to hold talks with Agriculture Ministry officials, Agriculture Minister Saeed Masri said Tuesday.
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The Israeli government is reported to have quietly approved the fast-track immigration of 7,000 members of a supposedly “lost Jewish” tribe, known as the Bnei Menashe, currently living in a remote area of India.
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US deployment of anti-missile defences off Iran's coast and in a number of its Gulf Arab neighbours is certain to fuel tensions in a strategic region that supplies a third of the world's oil, analysts say.
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NAZARETH- Leaders of the Arab minority in Israel warned this week that they were facing an unprecedented campaign of persecution, backed by the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, designed to stop their political activities.
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Health officials in Israel are subjecting many female Ethiopian immigrants to a controversial long-term birth control drug in what Israeli women’s groups allege is a racist policy to reduce the number of black babies.
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The number of people needing food aid in south Sudan has quadrupled in a year to more than four million, the UN's World Food Programme says.
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In January, US Army officials announced four separate court-martial charges against Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother who missed her deployment to Afghanistan in early November 2009 when her childcare plans for her infant son, Kamani, fell through at the last minute. Hutchinson was jailed and threatened with a court-martial if she did not agree to deploy to Afghanistan. Kamani was placed into a county foster care system.
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Renowned Swiss politician Daniel Streich, who rose to fame for his campaign against minarets of mosques, has embraced Islam.
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RIYADH - A 12-year-old Saudi girl unexpectedly gave up her petition for divorce from an 80-year-old man her father forced to marry in exchange for a dowry, Saudi media reported Tuesday.
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AMMAN - Prime Minister Samir Rifai on Monday said the rule of the law is a red line that should not be crossed.
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AMMAN - Many beauty salon owners violate labour laws, with hundreds of workers in the field receiving less than the minimum wage, according to a new study released on Monday.
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AMMAN - The Jordan Press Association (JPA) council on Monday endorsed a decision by its disciplinary committee to suspend Abdul Hadi Raji Majali, a columnist at Al Rai Daily, from practising journalism for six months.
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AMMAN - More than 100 ATV employees staged a sit-in Monday to protest against what they called the “imposition” of a one-month unpaid leave and claims they had not received their salaries.
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AMMAN - Minister of Political Development Musa Maaytah on Monday said the government is seriously thinking of increasing women’s presence in the next Lower House of Parliament.
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LONDON-A secret plan to foster an internal coup against Saddam Hussein was drawn up by the Government two years before the invasion of Iraq, The Independent can reveal.
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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday warned Israel should to "take another look at its relations with its neighbors" if it wants to maintain ties with Turkey in the future.
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ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, delivered a rambling rebuke of fellow African heads of state Sunday after they chose to replace him as chairman of the African Union and failed to endorse his push for the creation of a United States of Africa.
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BAGHDAD- A female suicide bomber walking among Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad detonated an explosives belt on Monday, killing at least 46 people and wounding more than 122, officials said.
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MOGADISHU-Heavy mortar fire between African Union peacekeepers and Islamist insurgents killed at least 12 civilians and left scores wounded in the Somali capital, officials and medics said Monday.
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AMMAN – Jordan has revoked citizenship from nearly 3,000 Jordanians of Palestinian origin in recent years and should put a stop to the practice, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released Monday.
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OSLO - Norway's government admitted Monday that one of its diplomats had delivered the two children of former Olympic champion Khalid Skah to a go-between who helped smuggle them out of his native Morocco.
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TEL AVIV - The Israeli military has disciplined two senior officers for the firing of white phosphorous shells toward a UN compound during the Gaza war, Israeli media said on Monday.
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Occupied Jerusalem- As the setting sun casts a reverential red glow over Jerusalem’s Old City, a small group of sheikhs and rabbis stand aloft on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the holy sites, joined in prayer. Their prayer is also joined up, an amalgam of recitations from Islam and Judaism, as if by fusing the powers of these two religions, the men can focus on their single cause: peace between the populations of the holy land.
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CAIRO - One of the great remaining mysteries from ancient Egypt, the ancestry of the boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun, may soon be solved, the country's antiquities supremo hinted on Sunday.
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The Obama administration plans to unveil a defense budget on Monday that pours billions into drones, helicopters and special forces, reflecting a focus on fighting Islamist extremists rather than conventional armies.
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PARIS — French prosecutors will appeal the judgment clearing former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin of complicity in an effort to tarnish his rival, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Paris state prosecutor announced on Friday
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Female students at Cairo University are defying religious and state efforts to ban the controversial niqab from schools and colleges, saying that wearing the controversial face veil is a religious obligation that also protects against sexual harassment.
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Yemen on Sunday said it would stop its war on Shiite northern rebels only if they agree to a six-point truce offer, including a pledge not to attack Saudi Arabia, as fighting raged on three fronts.
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JIFTLIK, Occupied Palestine- Area C doesn't sound very ominous. A land of stone-sprinkled grey hills and soft green valleys, it's part of the wreckage of the equally wrecked Oslo Agreement, accounting for 60 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was eventually supposed to be handed over to its Palestinian inhabitants.
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GAZA - The biggest European Parliamentary Delegation comprised of 55 MEPs and MPs from across Europe visited Gaza between 14 and 18 January 2010. The visit was prepared by the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza and The Palestinian Return Centre (PRC).
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GAZA CITY - The democratically elected Palestinian movement Hamas on Friday accused Israel of the assassination in Dubai last week of a founder of its resistance wing and threatened retaliation.
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Former prime minister Tony Blair said Friday there had been no "covert" deal with then US president George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, and robustly defended his decision to take Britain to war.
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At the small outpost atop the Jebel Doud, Saudi Major General Said al-Ghamedi doesn't miss a beat as automatic gunfire and mortar explosions echo across the valley below.
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The Nile Delta, Egypt's bread basket since antiquity, is being turned into a salty wasteland by rising seawaters, forcing some farmers off their lands and others to import sand in a desperate bid to turn back the tide.
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WASHINGTON- U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.
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WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq is ending and all US troops are coming home, US President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address, vowing continued US support of the Iraqi people.
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CAIRO - An Egyptian court ordered on Wednesday a stay of a ban on the full face veil, or niqab, in female schools affiliated with the Islamic Al-Azhar University.
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GAZA CITY - The Islamist Hamas movement said Wednesday it has investigated allegations in a UN report into last winter's Gaza war and absolved Palestinian armed groups of any atrocities.
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WASHINGTON - The bleak domestic realities washing over President Barack Obama’s White House cloak equally dismal prospects for quickly shepherding Israel and the Palestinians back to peace talks.
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AMMAN - With members from Iraq, Sudan and Somalia, Ibrahim Shawki says he belongs to an unlikely family.
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AMMAN - The Ministry of Health last year received some 3,000 complaints related to potential medical errors, unavailability of drugs, neglect and inhumane treatment of patients.
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AMMAN - The National Centre for Human Rights (NCHR) on Wednesday said the Crime Prevention Law undermines human rights, and called on the government to annul it or make substantial amendments consistent with international standards.
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The traditional debate between reformers and ultra-conservatives on issues that plague the lives of many Saudis, like the mixing of women with men or women's right to drive a car, begins to timidly infiltrate the religious establishment, which is one of the pillars of the regime in Saudi Arabia where a battle on the authorization of the cinema, considered by the clergy as "an absolute evil," had raged last summer.
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PARIS - Conservative Muslim women cover their hair in an array of fashions -- French members of parliament are keen to outlaw some of them.
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GENEVA - UN human rights experts warned on Wednesday that "widespread and systematic" secret detention of terror suspects could pave the way for charges of crimes against humanity.
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GAZA CITY - Abu Luay sold his wife's gold to pay for a visa to Germany, but if the Egyptian border does not open soon he will lose his only ticket out of Gaza, where life is an endless struggle against conflict and an Israeli siege.
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WASHINGTON- The United States has not done enough to protect the country against the threat of weapons of mass destruction even as Al-Qaeda appears intent on staging a large-scale attack, reports released Tuesday said.
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TEHRAN - Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is confident Islamic nations will one day watch the destruction of arch-foe Israel, his website on Wednesday quoted him as saying.
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OCCUPIED JERUSALEM - Israel has told UN chief Ban Ki-moon it will reject a UN demand to carry out a probe into allegations it committed war crimes during the Gaza war, a minister said on Tuesday.
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AMMAN - The Red-Dead Water Conveyance Project steering committee will hold a meeting in the Hague today, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported.
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AMMAN - Activists from the professional associations and opposition parties have formed a defence team for two men accused of slandering Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during a recent demonstration in Amman, according to members of the team.
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AMMAN - The Criminal Court has sentenced a 51-year-old exorcist to a 15-year prison term for sexually assaulting one of his “patients” in April 2009.
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AMMAN - No significant change in Jordan's human rights policies or practices was noted in 2009, while further restrictions on civic organisations were imposed, the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday.
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AMMAN - The Arab Organisation for Human Rights (AOHR) and families urged the government on Tuesday to take "serious" steps to secure the release of Jordanian prisoners abroad.
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AMMAN- His Majesty King Abdullah II, on Wednesday headed to Spain as part of a three-day working visit which will also include Switzerland.
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In the run-up to the international conference on Afghanistan to be held on 28 January in London, concern about rising civilian casualties remains high, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said today.
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Centuries-old Holy City cellar at heart of Byzantine battle
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AMMAN - Prime Minister Samir Rifai on Monday chaired a meeting of the higher steering committee for nuclear energy, where they reviewed the latest developments on the uranium mining project in central Jordan.
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AMMAN–– Minister of Foreign Affairs Nasser Judeh on Monday underlined Jordan's rejection of attempts to reduce services provided by UNRWA, which he said represents the international community's obligation to the rights of Palestinian refugees.
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MADABA - Madaba is set to be the first city completed under the third tourism project, but investors say their future remains “uncertain” as the healthy visitor flow into the mosaic city has yet to translate into steady income.
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AMMAN - The Jordan Food and Drug Administration (JFDA) on Monday suspended the licence of a weight-loss drug and decided to withdraw it from the market as it increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
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AMMAN - Prime Minister Samir Rifai on Monday said the government aspires to see a free and responsible press that acts as the Jordanian public's supervisory authority in monitoring public sector performance and exposing corruption.
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AMMAN - The impact of the cold air mass that affected the Kingdom over the past two days and brought heavy rainfall, strong winds, hail and thunder is forecast to taper off this afternoon, according to the Jordan Meteorological Department.
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AMMAN - The environment and local community in Azraq will receive a boost thanks to a paper recycling project inaugurated on Monday.
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Occupied Jerusalem - Mounting fear in Israel that the country’s leaders face war crimes charges over their involvement in the recent Gaza offensive pushed officials into a frenzy of activity at the weekend to forestall legal actions abroad.
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TEL AVIV - Israel on Sunday barred the Belgian development minister from going to the Gaza Strip, saying his visit would give legitimacy to the democratically elected Palestinian movement Hamas running the Israeli-besieged territory.
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LONDON - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown admitted Monday it had been a "mistake" to fail to prepare adequately for rebuilding Iraq following the 2003 invasion
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TEL AVIV - Already at the centre of unwelcome media attention over claims she mistreated a maid, Israel's first lady Sara Netanyahu is facing another lawsuit from a housekeeper, the Yediot Aharonot newspaper said on Monday.
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Many people wonder what relevance shari'a – Islamic principles – has in the modern world. In Morocco it has influenced national laws, especially the civil code and family law, primarily in a positive sense. Coupled with the country’s tradition of tolerance and openness, this has provided the Moroccan government with a foundation for protecting the rights of religious minorities within its borders.
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DUBAI: Human Rights Watch slammed on Sunday a United Arab Emirates court decision to acquit the brother of the UAE president of torture, saying the Gulf state’s reputation had been “sullied”.
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ROME - A retired Polish bishop accused Jews of exploiting the Holocaust for propaganda purposes in remarks that appeared Monday on a Rome-based traditionalist Roman Catholic website.
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GAZA –– Medical staff at Jordan's field hospital in the Gaza Strip offered medical treatment to more than 190,000 Gazans since its deployment in January 2009, according to the hospital’s director, Yasser Abu Ghazeh.
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