Just listening to Naomi Campbell is enough to get jet lag. In an interview on Monday with The Guardian newspaper, the 34-year-old British-born supermodel revealed how she didn’t stay in any one place for more than 48 hours the preceeding week.
London’s Westminster Council has thrown out a proposal to erect a statue of Nelson Mandela on Trafalgar Square, saying the 3m would be more appropriately placed outside the nearby South Africa House. So many e-mails were sent to the committee in support of the proposal that the council’s computer system crashed.
South African motorists have been warned that petrol could cost as much as R5 a litre. A few (sneaky) ways to modify your gas-guzzling habits include harnessing the power of gravity, souping up your vehicle, using veggie oil and driving barefoot. We tell you how.
Arms-exporting governments are reneging on their promises by failing to take into account the impact that the trade has on poverty, Oxfam says in a report published this week. The report, Guns or Growth, says six developing countries — Oman, Syria, Burma, Pakistan, Eritrea and Burundi — spend more on arms than they do on health and education combined.
The City of Cape Town for the second consecutive year has been named the number one long haul destination in the UK’s 2004 Trends and Spends Survey. The survey saw Cape Town beat off contender cities such as New York (second place), followed by Chicago, Boston, Miami, Dubai, Barbados and Las Vegas.
The Eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) vote looks set to become a permanent feature of the British political landscape but is likely to lead to a third-term Labour victory by default, according to a Guardian/ICM poll. The poll confirms that Ukip did the most damage to the Tory vote in the Euro elections.
Romania has banned the adoption of its children by families in other countries, except in very limited circumstances. The vote by MPs to approve the bill passed by the upper house two months ago bows to the EU’s demand that the lucrative trade in children should be stamped out.
Twenty people were arrested on Wednesday in dawn raids targeting an immigration scam that brought more than 1 000 people, mainly South Africans, into Britain using fraudulently obtained student visas. The raids were aimed at a huge immigration racket estimated to have earned the perpetrators millions.
In what looks like the first major blurring between telecommunications companies, credit card networks and banks, a conglomerate of cellphone networks in the United Kingdom and Europe is launching a system that may challenge credit cards as a way of paying for things, online and off.
Sea turtles can navigate themselves around the world with their own equivalent of the global positioning system, scientists believe after new research. Turtles are able to navigate across thousands of kilometres of ocean relying on the Earth’s magnetic fields. Scientists have wanted to know how turtles make vast Atlantic journeys, returning to specific feeding sites with pinpoint accuracy.
World leaders past and present paid tribute to Ronald Reagan, remembering the former United States president who died on Saturday as a hero and visionary statesman as well as a friend. Perhaps the warmest words came from former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan’s closest ally and ideological soul mate throughout the 1980s.
A fire that destroyed more than 100 art works worth millions in a London warehouse last week could have been started to cover up a burglary, British media reported on Friday. The burglars had broken into a unit at the warehouse in an industrial estate at Leyton before the fire broke out.
Humans have done so much damage to the atmosphere that even if they stop burning all fossil fuels immediately, they risk leaving an impoverished Earth for their descendants, an eminent scientist said this week. Professor James Lovelock, who detected the build-up of ozone- destroying CFCs and formulated the Gaia theory, told a conference in Britain this week: ”We have not yet awakened to the seriousness of global warming.”
A computer failure at a British air-traffic control centre grounded many of the country’s flights on Thursday morning, delaying thousands of travellers. The system was running again two hours later, but airports said the backlog of flights would cause serious delays throughout the day.
Paul McCartney says he got no thrill from heroin, but found cocaine more to his liking for a time. ”I tried heroin just the once,” McCartney said in interview published on Wednesday in the Daily Mirror newspaper. Despite enjoying cocaine for a time, he said he eventually turned against the drug.
World oil prices simmered close to record high levels on Wednesday as Opec producers, under heavy pressure from consumers to raise production, gathered in Beirut for a meeting overshadowed by a weekend terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. European Union finance ministers late on Tuesday expressed concern that skyrocketing oil prices could jeopardise Europe’s fledgling economic recovery, calling on Opec again to act to calm the market.
Thursday July 7 1966 was a particularly hot and muggy day in London. My mother had just given birth to me and in the bed next to her was a woman who had also had a baby. ”What are you going to call him,” my mother asked, as she lent over to look. ”Strawberry,” replied the woman, aglow with original thought. But giving a children exotic or unusual monikers actually reveals a singular lack of imagination.
A former Libyan intelligence agent jailed for 27 years over the 1988 bombing of a United States airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, has won the right to appeal, legal authorities said on Monday. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was sentenced last November to a minimum 27-year prison term, which the public prosecution is set to appeal for being unduly lenient.
Archaeologists said on Monday they have unearthed parts of a World War II fighter plane that crashed after downing a German bomber near Buckingham Palace. The plane’s engine and control panel were located late on Sunday during excavations in Buckingham Palace Road in the centre of the capital.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s discreet chief media strategist David Hill was in the spotlight of bad publicity on Wednesday for allegedly suggesting that the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport disaster might be an opportunity to boost London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics.
”I feel like my right as a parent has been taken away from me,” Maureen Smith, the girl’s mother, explained. ”I feel like I’ve had my heart ripped out so God knows what my daughter is going through. When she had her appendix out I signed two forms but nobody thought to tell me about this.” So, should the Brunts School in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, have usurped parental responsibility and proceeded without consulting the mother?
Giant food companies such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s were accused this week of exploiting the name of the Prince of Wales as a front for a campaign that will promote exercise as the cure for obesity, rather than changes in diet. The International Business Leaders Forum, of which Prince Charles is president, has recently launched a healthy eating, active living global partnership (Heal).
Two fathers protesting at lack of rights over their children disrupted the British Parliament on Wednesday by throwing two missiles containing purple powder, one of which hit Tony Blair as he was responding to questions. The protest by members of Fathers 4 Justice led Speaker Michael Martin to suspend the sitting immediately.
Each time you see pictures of United States soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners, what do you feel? Revulsion, probably. Compassion. Sadness. Anger, perhaps. But there’s something else puzzling in there, too: a more acute visceral reaction to the women’s involvement than the men’s.
It resembles a stairway to heaven. In fact, it is a series of steps in the death of a distant star. Using the Hubble space telescope, astronomers in Europe have peered across 2 300 light years of space to examine the strange structure of HD44179, sometimes called the Red Rectangle. It is similar to the sun, but far older, and now in its death throes.
The cost of air travel is to increase with carriers slapping a surcharge on tickets in an attempt to counter the impact of a huge rise in fuel prices. The aviation sector has seen the price of its fuel rise as a consequence of global crude hitting a barrel — its highest level in 13 years. Soaring oil prices have also dragged up gas prices by 44% over 12 months.
Monsanto has abandoned plans to introduce genetically modified (GM) wheat on to the world market, despite spending seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing the crop. Monsanto, the world’s biggest seller of GM seeds, had looked to the development and introduction of GM wheat to fulfil a dream of dominating the world’s bread market.
The abuse of Iraqi prisoners is the inevitable consequence of occupation and the ultimate responsibility lies at the top. Coalition soldiers and security men are the subject of random, repeated attacks that have resulted in many deaths. The arbitrary nature of those casualties, and the impossibility of seeing the enemy clearly, encourage armed forces to respond in ways that would be intolerable in conventional warfare.
The editor of the British tabloid Daily Mirror was sacked on Friday after being caught up in a scandal involving fake pictures that purportedly showed British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, the newspaper said. ”The Daily Mirror has been the subject of a calculated and malicious hoax,” the paper said.
Britain’s influential Financial Times newspaper on Wednesday demanded the resignation of United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners and issued a stinging criticism of his boss, George Bush.
Two people were feared dead and dozens injured after a powerful explosion destroyed a plastics factory in Scotland’s largest city of Glasgow on Tuesday, emergency services said. Up to 20 people were also thought to be trapped in the rubble and another 60 injured when the building collapsed after the explosion.
Sir Dick Evans, the retiring chairperson of British Aerospace (BAE) who faced his final shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday, has been named in allegations concerning the arms firm’s £60-million ”slush fund”, according to documents seen by The Guardian. ‘Sir Dick’ is fingered by documents that detail gifts to a Saudi prince.