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Swedes voted by 56 per cent to 42 per cent not to join the euro zone of the European Union; the turnout was more than 80 per cent. Three days before the referendum, Mrs Anna Lindh, the foreign minister, was stabbed to death in a shop. Estonians voted overwhelmingly to join the European Union; about 300,000 stateless Russians will come with them. The World Trade Organisation ministerial meetings at Cancun, Mexico, collapsed without agreement after African and Asian countries combined to reject proposals by the European Union and Japan on investment. In Iraq American troops shot dead eight Iraqi security men and a Jordanian hospital guard under the misapprehension that they were enemy combatants; the exchange of fire lasted three hours at Faluja, where in April American troops shot dead 15 Iraqi demonstrators. Mr Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, visited Baghdad and said, ‘It will be some time before any new government can take over responsibility for security.’ Israel might decide to kill President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority, according to Mr Ehud Olmert, the Israeli deputy prime minister, who said, ‘Killing him is definitely one of the options. We are trying to eliminate all the heads of terror and Arafat is one of the heads of terror.’ President Kumba Yalla of Guinea-Bissau was deposed in a bloodless coup by General Verissimo Correia Seabra, who accused him of having violated the constitution. In Zimbabwe police closed the Daily News, the nation’s only independent daily. Yetunde Price, aged 31, the eldest sister of Serena and Venus Williams, the tennis champions, was shot dead in the Compton district of Los Angles. Minlagh Shah Khan, a Pakistani, was beheaded in Riyadh for drug-smuggling; 41 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia this year. Fifty thousand Australian sheep were stranded in a ship in the Persian Gulf after being rejected by their Saudi buyers as too diseased; so far 3,500 have died.
CSH
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