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/ 28 February 2007
An alternative beauty pageant to be held in a remote Icelandic town will reward contestants’ wrinkles, saggy breasts and other bodily imperfections and hopes to challenge Western ideas of beauty, organisers said on Wednesday. "Anyone can make the rules about what beauty is; we want to change the rules," one of the contest’s organisers, Matthhildur Helgadottir, said.
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/ 3 November 2006
We went looking for elves in Iceland. Belief in the unseen runs so high here that the Public Roads Administration sometimes delays or reroutes road construction to avoid what locals believe are elf habitations or cursed spots. Search ”elves” and ”Iceland” on Google and you get 846 000 hits, nearly triple Iceland’s population.
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/ 17 January 2006
Polar lights offer a grandiose spectacle especially when observed from a 37-degrees-Celsius thermal bath at air temperatures of below zero. Iceland’s Blue Lagoon has no artificial light to spoil the show. Polar light activity is best seen on clear nights during autumn and winter. The "moon landscape" in which the thermal bath is situated evokes a surreal atmosphere.
Iceland was embroiled in a political crisis on Monday as the country’s president appeared poised to veto a media law proposed by the government, a first in the Icelandic republic’s 60-year history. The draft law calls for the break-up of media groups if they concentrate too much power over media in their hands.
Environmentalists and the tourist industry on Thursday criticised Iceland’s decision to resume limited whaling, saying it was unnecessary and could hurt the country’s booming whale-watching businesses.