The Vatican may have territorial limits, its own post office and even a football tournament, but it has hitherto lacked what all real states offer: an airline. That will be put right this month as the Vatican launches its first charter flights for pilgrims from Rome to Lourdes, with some of the world’s top religious destinations to follow, including the shrine of Fatima in Portugal and the shrine of the Madonna of Guadalupe in Mexico.
First the gay and lesbian community got its own red carpet movie bash. Then every embassy in Pretoria wanted theirs. Then serious nonÂÂfiction film buffs got the Encounters film festival and hard-line political activists followed suit with the Tri-Continental festival and its focus on the countries of the South.
In one of the largest deals of the web 2.0 era, the Walt Disney Company recently agreed to pay as much as -million to buy Club Penguin, a ”virtual world” for children between the ages of six and 14. When kids join Club Penguin, they adopt an animated penguin as their online alter ego, or avatar.
For the retired businessman bored with zero gravity flights, heli- skiing, flying ex-military Russian Mig fighter jets and swimming with sharks, climbing Everest can be the perfect next date on the adventure calendar. But research on more than 2 000 expeditions to the world’s highest peak has shown that older climbers are more likely to fail and more likely to die on the mountain.
With more than 80% of the South African land surface still legally in the hands of whites, it is a puzzle that the land question does not feature prominently in current political and economic debates. However one looks at things, land inequality remains one of the main indicators of social differentiation — and, indeed, it is at the heart of the struggle for citizenship and against poverty.
President Thabo Mbeki will require evidence before considering media reports that Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was an alcoholic and had been convicted of theft, his office said on Sunday. The Sunday Times reported that chronic alcoholism was the real reason the minister had a liver transplant.
Twenty-two people have been killed in a smash involving a truck and a minibus taxi on the N4 near Komatipoort in Mpumalanga, radio news reported on Sunday. The minibus taxi apparently hit a truck from behind and caught fire. The passengers were trapped inside and burned to death.
Health authorities in Peru on Sunday battled the spread of infectious diseases in the wake of a devastating earthquake as President Alan Garcia threatened a curfew to stop looting. Aftershocks continued to keep people on edge. Peru’s geophysical institute reported more than 400 tremors following the quake.
A huge fire ripped through an abandoned skyscraper next to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan on Saturday, killing two firefighters who were responding to the blaze. The former Deutsche Bank office building had been vacant since the September 11 terrorist attacks turned it into a toxic nightmare.
The party of President Nursultan Nazarbayev has won all seats in Kazakhstan’s new Parliament, according to preliminary results announced on Sunday by the Central Elections Commission. The results were quickly condemned by the country’s two largest opposition groupings, which said the figures were manipulated.