Backgrounder: The Dutch royal family

Two people were killed and 12 wounded when a car careered into a crowd of people watching the Dutch royal family riding past in an open-top bus Thursday. The accident occurred during Queen’s Day, a national holiday celebrated every April 30 to mark the queen’s birthday. Queen Beatrix’s, the current monarch, birthday is actually January 31

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Commentary: Flu and your health on a plane

The novel swine flu is showing the world just how interconnected we are and how commercial aircraft can serve as vehicles of rapid disease spread. (CNN) — The novel swine flu is showing the world just how interconnected we are and how commercial aircraft can serve as vehicles of rapid disease spread. I am frequently asked: What is the risk of catching an illness while flying In a nutshell, the risk of getting an infection while you’re in an enclosed space such as an airplane depends upon three factors: The infectiousness of the contagious person spreading the illness; the degree of your exposure (how close you are to the contagious person and for how long); and the ventilation of the space or passenger cabin.

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Cambodia’s long road to justice

Norng Chan Phal ran through the notorious Khmer Rouge prison S-21 in the Cambodian capital as a 9-year-old boy, frantically looking for his mother after their torturers had fled from advancing Vietnamese troops in 1979. He didn’t find his mother, but what he did see made him hide under a pile of clothes with other children for days in the prison. “I was shocked when I saw the bodies — I was thinking maybe my mother was killed like this as well and I ran back to hide with the other kids,” he told CNN

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Teen argued with teacher, left school and vanished

On May 4, 2007, Kara Kopetsky, a 17-year-old high school junior in Belton, Missouri, was not having a good day. She forgot one of her textbooks and called home and asked her mom to drop it off at the school office. She also asked her mother to wash her uniform so she could work the 4 p.m.

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Swine Flu: Mexico’s Lost Weekend

Without traffic, the drive to Mexico City from Cuernavaca usually can take just 50 minutes. Weekends are the exception, when the horrendous jams of vehicles returning from a quick trip outside the capital can snarl the highways for up to three hours. The close of this past weekend, however, was ghostly

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Taliban push Robin Hood image in Pakistan

In radio broadcasts and sermons, Taliban militants have been promoting themselves as Islamic Robin Hoods, defending Pakistan’s rural poor from a ruling elite that they describe as corrupt and oppressive. That message has been resonating throughout the Pakistani countryside, where the culture is deeply conservative and the people are desperately poor

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