Sunday, September 27, 2009 Berlin: German voters appear ready to return Chancellor Angel Merkel to office to head a centre-right coalition in Sept. 27 elections. A poll released Friday – the last to be released before Germans vote – shows Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats with 35 percent support. Her preferred coalition partners, the Free Democrats, have 14 percent, enough for them to form a governing coalition. Merkel's main rivals the Social Democrats have 26 percent support, the poll by Infratest dimap showed. That is a jump of three points, reflecting a strong performance by their candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier in a televised debate with Merkel last week. The poll gave a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in...
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