Patrick Barkham
Guest Author
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/ 27 February 2007

The bald truth

The hairdressers at Esther’s Haircutting Studio in Tarzana, California, were locking their doors for the night last Friday when a cavalcade of cars drew up outside. Britney Spears jumped out of one of the vehicles and, accompanied by her bodyguards, marched into the salon. When owner Esther Tognozzi refused to shave off the pop star’s hair, Spears took hold of the clippers and removed her locks herself.

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/ 23 March 2006

Oops! We helped ruin the planet

They are the gurus of globetrotting, the men who built publishing empires from their adventures and wrote guidebooks encouraging millions to venture further afield than ever before. Now the founders of the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet books, are uniting to urge tourists to fly less.

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/ 16 September 2005

No gas for fuel protest

A potentially crippling campaign of fuel protests failed to materialise across the United Kingdom this week as tiny groups of beleaguered demonstrators failed to stop tankers filling up with petrol and diesel at oil refineries and depots across the country. With few demonstrators in sight, it was also business as usual at two refineries in west Wales that, five years ago, witnessed dramatic blockades.

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/ 6 May 2004

Catholic Church short on priests

Catholics around the world celebrated Vocation Sunday last weekend by focusing on those who commit their working lives to the church. But many prayers were more fervent than usual after renewed predictions that the number of Catholic priests in Britain is set to halve in the next decade.

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/ 30 April 2004

Kenya to probe unsolved mystery

The Kenyan government was this week poised to reinvestigate the murder of British woman Julie Ward. In a dramatic intervention during an inquest held in Britain 16 years after Ward’s death, the Kenyan government admitted there had been ”deliberate obstruction” of her father’s attempts to discover how she died on the Masai Mara game reserve.