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/ 26 January 2009
Icelandic Prime Minister Geir Haarde announced on Monday the resignation of his government in the wake of the country’s dire economic crisis.
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/ 18 January 2008
Bobby Fischer, who died on January 17 aged 64, was a high school dropout who may have been the greatest chess player of all time, but ended his life in eccentric seclusion. The United States-born player had lived for the last two years in Iceland after serving eight months behind bars in Japan.
When the European Union banned exports of fish from Lake Victoria during the 1990s, it highlighted the difficulty African countries can have with European health and safety standards. For Uganda, where fishery exports constitute 6% of the country’s gross domestic product that kind of trade barrier can seriously hamper economic development.
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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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/ 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.
A day after the US and Russia agreed to a landmark cut in nuclear warheads, Nato foreign ministers met to seal an accord with Moscow to bury Cold War enmity and formalise new cooperation, notably against terrorism.