If you are sailing around the world, you’d be advised to avoid Somalian water. Somali pirates have hijacked (another) ship with 10 crew on its way to the Somali port of El-Maan. The MV Torgelow was carrying fuel and food to a UN-chartered vessel freed last week by gunmen who had held it and its cargo of food aid for three months. The International Maritime Board says there have been at least 20 attacks on ships in Somali waters since March. It urges ships in the area to stay as far away as possible from the shore.

Travel Facts

One in three adults aged 15-49 are infected with HIV/AIDS in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland.

If you thought Antarctica was inhospitable, think again – its land area is only 98% ice. Reassuringly, the other 2% is categorised as ‘barren rock’.

The Mall in Washington, D.C. is 1.4 times larger than Vatican City.

Moldova has one of the lowest rates of movie-going of any nation, and the highest rate of death by powered lawnmower. Coincidence? Surely not.

In 2002, every 1000 Swedes made a bus.

· Looking for geniuses? Head straight to Iceland. There are more than 3.5 Nobel Prize Winners for every million Icelanders.

· People might eat oats when they’re hungry, but people from Hungary don’t eat oats.

· Japan’s water has a very high dissolved oxygen concentration – but not enough to prevent drowning in the bath.

· The four largest nations are Russia, China, USA, and Canada.

Source:

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US scientists have found that all modern varieties of potatoes can be traced back to a single source – a potato grown in Peru over 7,000 years ago. The team, led by Dr David Spooner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who spends two months a year collecting wild potatoes on treks in South America’s mountainous regions analysed the DNA of about 360 potatoes, both wild and cultivated. Dr Spooner said archaeological finds had shown potatoes were being grown in Peru by farmers “more than 7,000 years ago”. Potatoes were brought back to Spain by the conquistadors around 1570, and spread throughout Europe. They were later introduced in North America by British colonists.

On Wednesday, 29th March 2006, the shadow of the Moon will sweep a band starting from Brazil, through Atlantic Ocean, Gold Coast of Africa, Saharan Desert, Mediterranean Sea, Turkey, Black Sea, Georgia, Russian Federation, northern shores of Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan; ending in Mongolia. The duration of totality will be less than 2 minutes near the sunrise and sunset limits, but will be as long as 4 minutes and 7 seconds in Libya, at the moment of greatest eclipse.  The partial phases will be witnessed by all of Europe. All Asia west of Yakutsk, Mongolia, central China and Myanmar, and north of the line joining Bombay and Calcutta will see some of the Moon in front of the Sun. Also, only the south eastern parts of Africa will miss the partial eclipse.

We have seen four fatal plane crashes this month in Europe and South America claim the lives of hundreds of people.   On 6 August at least 13 of 39 passengers and crew were killed after a Tunisian passenger plane made an emergency landing in the sea off the Italian island of Sicily.  On 14 August, all 121 passengers and crew on a Cyprus airline flight bound for Prague died when it crashed into a mountainside near Athens.  Two days later, a Colombian plane operated by West Caribbean Airways crashed in a remote region of Venezuela, killing all 160 people on board.  In the latest crash, a passenger plane came down in Peru's Amazon jungle, causing the deaths of at least 40 of the 100 people on board.  Investigations continue into what went wrong on these flights. 

The Operations and Safety editor of Flight International magazine says that airline safety worldwide is now six times better than it was 25 years ago.  In 1979 there were three fatal accidents per million flights, compared with one fatal accident per two million flights by last year, according to International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) figures.  Safety improvements are due to better technology, compulsory industry audits and tougher competition, he said.  When compared with all other modes of transport on a fatality per kilometre basis, air transport is the safest, insists the Civil Aviation Authority.

In some parts of Nepal, particularly the western parts of the country, there is a tradition of keeping women in cow sheds during their menstrual cycle.  Nepal's Supreme Court has ordered the government to declare the practice as evil and have given one month to stop the practice.  Women's rights activists have said that this is a positive move but a change in the law alone is not enough, that people need to be educated against such a scourge of society.

Clarence House stands next to St James's Palace and was built between 1825 and 1827 to the designs of John Nash for Prince William Henry, Duke of Clarence.  He lived there as King William IV from 1830 until 1837.  During the second world war, the War Organisation of the British Red Cross and Order of St. John of Jerusalem for the duration of the war. Two hundred staff of the Foreign Relations Department maintained contact from Clarence House with British prisoners-of-war abroad, and administered the Red Cross Postal Message Scheme.  In 1949 Clarence House was returned to Royal use, when it became the London home of Princess Elizabeth, elder daughter of George VI, following her marriage to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten on 20 November 1947. The couple could not move in straight away since the building needed complete refurbishment. Wartime restrictions on building work made progress slow. The Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, as they were then known, moved to their new home in June 1949.

It was the London home of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother from 1953 until 2002.  A story goes that she once (probably often) rang down to the butlers after getting no response from her bell pull and said in a very camp way: “I don't know what you old queens are doing down there but this old queen up here is dying for a glass of gin.” For a time Princess Margaret lived there too.  After the death of the Queen Mother, Clarence House became the official London residence of The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall. It is open to the public during the summer months each year.

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