Jul 7 (Reuters) -
TOP STORIES
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WASHINGTON - U.S. President Barack Obama and top U.S. lawmakers searched on Thursday for ways to break a budget deadlock over spending and taxes with some signs of a potential compromise that would avoid a debt default.
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TRIPOLI - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Thursday he was against NATO intervention in Libya but had to go along with it, an admission that exposed the fragility of the alliance trying to unseat Muammar Gaddafi.
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CAIRO - Arab governments were swift to condemn Libya's Muammar Gaddafi in February when he tried to crush a popular uprising with machineguns and heavy artillery. Now, as Syria's Bashar al-Assad uses tanks and live bullets to smash a wave of street protests, the relative silence from Arab capitals speaks volumes.
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SANAA/ADEN - Yemen's acting leader has put forward a new plan to end the country's political stalemate, which would keep President Ali Abdullah Saleh in power longer than outlined in earlier initiatives, an opposition source said on Thursday.
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KHARTOUM - Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir vowed to fight northern rebels and boycott future international peace talks on Thursday, two days before the secession of the south of his country.
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ROME/FRANKFURT - International bankers and European Union officials made no progress on Thursday in securing a private sector contribution for a second bailout of Greece and bond yields climbed on concern about the scheme.
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WASHINGTON - U.S. Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Thursday clashed over a nearly 50-year-old program to help workers displaced by trade, threatening passage by Congress of three already long-delayed trade deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
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BEIJING - China may rein in plans to invest heavily in seven new strategic industries, including high speed rail and wind power, scaling back cutting-edge projects for industries suffering from old-fashioned problems such as corruption and overcapacity, sources said.
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BEIJING - Chinese state media denied rumours on Thursday that former president Jiang Zemin had died after a Hong Kong television station said he had, sparking a wave of speculation about a leadership transition due next year.
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BANGKOK - Support for the red-shirt protest movement that rallied behind Thai Prime minister-elect Yingluck Shinawatra, helping her win elections by a landslide, could splinter if demands for justice over deadly protests last year are not met, its leader said.
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TOKYO - Japan's government scrambled to assure wary public on Thursday that stress testing nuclear reactors did not call into question their safety after confusion over the plan threatened to delay the first restart of reactors since the March 11 earthquake triggered a radiation crisis.
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LONDON - In a breathtaking response to a scandal engulfing his media empire, Rupert Murdoch moved on Thursday to close down the News of the World, Britain's biggest selling Sunday newspaper.
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