Category Archives: Sidebar

Globetrotter Travel Award

Under 30? A member of Globetrotters Club? Interested in a £1,000 travel award?

Know someone who is? We have £1,000 to award each year for five years for the best submitted independent travel plan. Interested?

Then see our legacy page on our Website, where you can apply with your plans for a totally independent travel trip and we'll take a look at it. Get those plans in!!

JFK Airport to Use Iris Scanning

John F. Kennedy International Airport has become the first airport in the United States to use iris scanning technology to prevent employee security breaches. Kennedy has been testing the technology on about 300 employees working at Terminal 4 for two months, although the program is not mandatory for now. The idea is that the technology prevents employees from giving their ID cards to someone else. The scanner stores 247 traits of a person's iris into a computer and on his or her ID card's magnetic strip.

Terminal officials said they believe the technique is more specific than fingerprinting, which checks for 85 traits. The $2,000 iris scanner and the $15,000 door barring entry into a secure area have been installed at the customs area leading to the tarmac. If the scanner fails to match an employee's eyes and card, an alarm sounds and security guards are dispatched. After swiping their cards, workers peer into the scanner for 10 to 15 seconds, until the door clicks open. The system works with contact lenses and eyeglasses, but not with sunglasses. The Charlotte, North Carolina, airport used similar technology in 2000, but suspended the system last year.

Did You Know&

Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina has a population of around 3 million, (metropolitan area of 13 million) and there is a 12,000 strong Greek community. Emigration from Greece to Buenos Aires peaked between WWI and WWII. Today, the Greek community of Buenos Aires is the largest and wealthiest of its type in Latin America. Many are successful businessmen, ship owners, scholars and writers.

Buenos Aires’ most famous Greek immigrant is Aristotle Onassis, a refugee from Smyrna, who arrived in Buenos Aires on September 21st, 1923. Onassis was involved with tobacco manufacturing, before buying his first merchant ship in the early 1930s. In 1932, Onassis was appointed Honorary Deputy Consul of Greece to Buenos Aires. He later became one of the world's wealthiest men.

Key West Diver Find

A diver discovered a 40.2-carat emerald embedded in a conch shell while diving at the site of a Spanish galleon wrecked in a Florida Keys hurricane 380 years ago.

The diver, who unsurprisingly does not want his name revealed, discovered the giant raw emerald while washing shells in a classroom laboratory. “Out popped a 40.2-carat emerald,” Patrick Clyne, vice president at Key West-based wreck salvage company Mel Fisher Enterprises, said Monday. “It was one of those freak-of-nature things that somehow got swept up in the conch shell.”

The diver had gathered the shells from a dive off the Spanish galleon Santa Margarita, which sank Sept. 6,

1622, about 30 miles west of Key West. “This is an excellent indication that the Margarita had raw emeralds

smuggled aboard the ship,” Clyne said. “There were no emeralds listed on its cargo manifest.” There were no

estimates for how much the emerald might be worth. But in 1985, a 77.7-carat emerald from the vessel

Nuestra Senora de Atocha, a sister ship of the Santa Margarita, was appraised at $1.2 million. The vessels,

part of a 28-ship fleet that left Havana on Sept. 4, 1622, for Spain with treasures from Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, sank during a hurricane.

Lake Diving, 4 Miles High!

Scientists are set to explore the world’s highest fresh water lake 4 miles up in the Licancabur volcano near Antofogasta in Chile.

Their aim is to find out how the organisms that live there can survive in such a hostile environment. They will do this by taking samples and diving to the bottom of the lake.

Although the lake at Licancabur volcano is covered with almost two feet of ice during much of the year, the expedition will take place in the southern hemisphere's spring, when the lake is not completely frozen.

The information they hope to gather will help astrobiologists devise strategies and technologies to search for life on planets like Mars during future missions.

Learn English at Youth Hostels in the UK

The Youth Hostels Association (YHA) has teamed with English Out There to offer English language courses for visitors to London. Accommodation will be at one of six YHA hostels in the capital and the packages include bed and breakfast, an Underground pass and tickets to some famous attractions.

The language lessons are designed around themes or tasks, and students can choose how many they want to take from 20 modules. The students are expected to be mainly families or young people, who want to combine a holiday with improving their English.

Websites: yha.org.uk and EnglishOutThere.co.uk.

Source: britainexpress.com

Fave Websites of the Month

The Beetle likes cityguide.travel-guides.com

Here you can select from a number of cities around the world and compile your own guide, for free. There is a very diverse set of headings from which to chose, e.g. history, cost of living, getting around, shopping, excursions, major sites, tourist information, street maps, nightlife, sport, culture, special events etc.

If you are going away for the weekend and don’t want to buy a guidebook or just want to do some digging around, this is an excellent resource.

New Sources for Genealogists

Here's a new resource for genealogists. Origin Search is a search engine just for finding family history information. You do have to pay a fee to use the service, but you can try out the Irish resources for free.

Take a look at their website

Space Tourism Lifts Off

Recent press reports state that a Houston store for space buffs is helping the Russian Space Agency find potential space tourists who have $20 million to spare. This seems to be the going rate for space tourists, paid by the two last space tourists, American Dennis Tito and South African Mark Shuttleworth. The Russian space industry appear to have decided that offering space trips to incredibly wealthy people is a good way to continue to finance its participation in building the space station. Vladimir Fishel, vice president of Russian programs for Spacehab, a US spacecraft and living space manufacturer and parent company of The Space Store, acknowledged the few wealthy people enough to pay the tab likely would approach Russian space officials themselves. But marketing efforts could add that extra bit of encouragement. “Russians are in dire need of cash,” he said. “This helps not only them, but everybody.”