00:00Good day! Welcome to the Gulf News Update for Wednesday, March the 6th. Here are the
00:10top stories at this hour. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has died
00:15after a two-year battle with cancer, ending 14 years of rule that won him passionate support
00:20among the poor. The 58-year-old had undergone four operations in Cuba for a cancer that
00:26was first detected in mid-2011. He vanished from public view after surgery in December
00:31that resulted in complications and respiratory infections.
00:34Vice President Nicolás Maduro will be the interim president till elections are held
00:39within 30 days. It took a while for French expat Nassim Haider
00:43to feel assured that the call he received on Tuesday morning was genuine, that he had
00:47won one million dirhams in the Gulf News mega-subscription 2013 promotions. Haider, who was born in Karachi
00:53and raised in Paris, said he never won a raffle before. The Gulf News mega-subscription
00:58is an annual promotion giving subscribers a chance to win a variety of prizes, including
01:03the one million dirham award for one subscriber. The suspects in the torture death of a Kuwaiti
01:08student of the University of Sharjah said they had beaten the 19-year-old over a period
01:12of three days for allegedly harassing one of their female relatives. It is understood
01:17that Mubarak Mishael Mubarak was accused of harassing the sister of one of the three suspects.
01:22Authorities indicated this explains why the victim maintained his silence despite four
01:26days of torture. Syrian warplanes have bombed the northern
01:29city of Raqqa, hours after reports said rebels had overrun it. Meanwhile, US Secretary of
01:34State John Kerry said Washington was increasingly confident that weapons being sent to the Syrian
01:39opposition by other countries were going to moderate forces. Iraq's Interior Ministry
01:44said it had foiled an attempt by Syrian gunmen to infiltrate its territory, amid growing
01:48signs that Syria's civil war was spilling over into its eastern neighbor. In business,
01:53the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.5% on Tuesday to close at an all-time high of
01:5814,253.77 points. The previous record was set in 2007.
02:04Sport and Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson was too distraught to face the media
02:09after seeing his side beaten by Real Madrid in the Champions League last night. Real will
02:14be joined in the quarterfinals by Borussia Dortmund.
02:17In entertainment, Jon Stewart will take a break from The Daily Show starting in June
02:20to direct and produce his first feature film. Rosewater was written by Stewart and is based
02:25on a book by Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari, who was falsely accused of being a spy imprisoned
02:31by Iran in 2009. Finally, weather. Today's high across the
02:35UAE will be 36 degrees Celsius, falling to 15 degrees at night.
02:40That's all for now. Thanks for watching. And as always, you can get the latest news at
02:43gulfnews.com.
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