It was started by a handful of isolated enthusiasts, gradually became a cult craze, and is now threatening to become a commercial enterprise.
Prince William and Kate Middleton’s engagement on November 16 has already sent Chinese factories whirring into production.
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/ 21 December 2006
It lived in the Yangtze river for millions of years and was revered by the Chinese as the ”goddess” of the mighty river. But now scientists believe that the baiji, a white, freshwater dolphin, is extinct. A painstaking six-week hunt on the Yangtze for any remaining signs of the baiji ended this month with the news scientists had been dreading: there don’t appear to be any remaining.
The Spanish have waited for a very long time to hear the announcement by ETA, the armed Basque separatist movement, that it is declaring a permanent ceasefire from March 24. This will be an extremely important milestone if it indeed marks the end of a 40-year campaign of terrorist violence that has left hundreds dead, many of them innocent civilians.
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/ 7 November 2005
Enraged citizens taking to the streets is one of the recurring themes of French history. But the latest bout of rioting in the suburbs of north-east Paris is a toxic and modern mixture of alienated ethnic minority youth and a heavy-handed response by the security forces.
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/ 24 October 2005
Europe is on high alert after Greece became the first European Union country to confirm a case of bird flu. Greek Minister of Agriculture Evangelos Basiakos reported the case on a turkey farm on the Aegean Sea island of Oinouses, near the coast of Turkey, on Tuesday last week.
Whatever happened to the cast-iron principle that high oil prices are bad for the stock market? A day after oil touched -per-barrel, the FTSE 100 (the index of top 100 British companies) recorded another three-year high on Tuesday. The FTSE 250 index, supposedly a broader measure of the health of corporate Britain, is doing even better, hitting all-time highs.
In case anyone was thinking that Britain’s nuclear installations were clean and green, there comes a chilling reminder that they are far from being either. A leak — a real leak, rather than a piece of spin doctoring — of highly radioactive uranium and plutonium last month forced the closure of the Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield in northern England.
John Paul II’s papacy has been one of the longest and most energetic of any in 2 000-odd years of the history of the Catholic Church. On that at least Catholics agree, but there is much less agreement on the nature of this remarkable man’s achievements. John Paul II attracted admiration, incomprehension and hate in almost equal measure.