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India Upholds Death Penalty over 1993 Mumbai Blasts

India's top court upheld the death penalty on Thursday for a mastermind of a series of bombings which killed 257 people in Mumbai in 1993, the deadliest set of attacks in the country's history.

Yakub Memon, brother of the alleged main plotter and fugitive Tiger Memon, was the only one of 11 convicts to see his death sentence upheld by the Supreme Court for his role in the blasts which wounded more than 800 people.

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Oxford Students Protest Harlem Shake Sacking

Oxford University students have lodged a protest about the "hugely unjust" sacking of a librarian who failed to stop about 30 students performing the Harlem Shake in a college library.

They claim that Calypso Nash, a graduate student of St Hilda's College, had nothing to do with the filming of the Internet dance craze last month but just happened to be there at the time.

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UK Museum Cancels Gig over Fears it Will Bring House Down

Britain's prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum said Wednesday it had been forced to cancel a concert by "grind metal" band Napalm Death because of fears that the music will quite literally bring the house down.

The British band had been scheduled to play a daring concert at the museum on Friday through a ceramic sculpture which -- if all had gone to plan -- would have exploded under the force of their music.

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Praise for U.S. Officials' Modest Lunch Bill in China

Chinese netizens praised the U.S. Treasury chief Thursday for eating a cheap dumpling lunch after meeting new President Xi Jinping, comparing his modest bill to the lavish spending habits of domestic officials.

Jacob Lew met Xi in the grandeur of Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Tuesday, and later had lunch with two colleagues at the Bao Yuan Dumpling House near the U.S. Embassy, where the bill came to 109 yuan ($17.50).

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Greenpeace in Arctic Protest on Jerusalem Bridge of Strings

Five Greenpeace activists on Thursday chained themselves to Jerusalem's soaring Bridge of Strings demanding that U.S. President Barack Obama halt exploratory drilling in the Arctic, an Agence France Presse correspondent said.

Wearing white overalls and yellow helmets, the five used climbing gear to inch up the metal cables which spans a busy intersection at the entrance to the city.

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U.S. Senate Approves Stop-Gap Funding Bill

A bill to avert a U.S. government shutdown has won passage from a divided U.S. Senate after lawmakers cut deals on amendments, setting the stage for the president to sign it this week.

It also cleared the way for key debate on the 2014 budget.

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Police Kill Islamist in Bangladesh Mob Attack

Bangladeshi police shot dead an Islamist supporter on Thursday as they tried to fend off a mob attack by some 2,000 opposition activists angered by the ongoing war crimes trials of their leaders.

Police said 2,000 supporters of the country's largest Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, attacked a group of 90 officers at a village in the western Jhenidah district after they tried to arrest some Jamaat activists.

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Google Chairman: India a Laggard in Internet Revolution

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has warned that India is lagging badly behind in harnessing the power of the Internet because of its failure to invest in high-speed telecom networks.

"It is well behind in the web services model that the rest of the world is adopting," Schmidt told the CNBC-TV18 television channel late Wednesday during a trip to India.

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Gaza Rockets Hit Southern Israel during Obama Visit

Two rockets fired by militants in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Thursday hit southern Israel as U.S. President Barack Obama was visiting the Jewish state, police said.

"One exploded in the back yard of a house in Sderot, causing damage, and the second landed in a field," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse, referring to a town very close to the Gaza border, which was visited by Obama on a previous trip in 2008 when he was a senator.

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Turkey Awaits 'Historic' Ceasefire Call by Kurdish Rebel Chief

Jailed Kurdish rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan was set to call a "historic" ceasefire on Thursday, raising expectations for an end to a three-decade conflict with Turkey that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

The widely anticipated ceasefire call is to come in a letter penned by the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) from his isolated island prison cell, and millions of people nationwide are set to tune in to hear his words read out on television and radio.

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