Kofi Anan says that substantial increases in illegal fishing, tourism, bio-prospecting, climate change and depletion of the ozone continue to pose major challenges to the Antarctic, and governments should continue to make major efforts to secure the area as a natural reserve devoted to peace and science.  Illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing for toothfish in the Southern Ocean still exceeds reported catches despite major efforts to address such activities.  Other major areas of concern are the increase in tourism over the last 10 years.  There is an increase by 308% in ship-borne tourists to the Antarctic Peninsula since 1993, up to 27,324 in 2004-5, from 6,704 in 1992-3.  An increase in high-risk, adventure tourism has also wrought havoc on the region, creating the need for new search and rescue missions and country liability assessments. 

Spotted on the Globetrotter's forum: http://milvetstravel.net/virtualtours.html is a website that allows you to take virtual tours of a whole host of places – check it out, it's pretty interesting!

If you have a travellers tale that your aching to tell. Then why not visit the “Travel Sized Bites” section of the Website and share it with the world. Travel Sized Bites

Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, the third and fourth-largest US air carriers, both declared bankruptcy in September citing rising oil prices and low-cost competition among their reasons.

Saturday 12^th November 2005, 10.30am – 4.00pm                        

Location:
The Newsroom, The Guardian
60 Farringdon Rd, London EC1R 3GA
Cost: £87.50

A day of two intensive workshops:

Travel writing and how to do it and how not to with Dea Birkett, the Guardian Travel columnist and author of Serpent in Paradise and Off the Beaten Track

Fact, fiction and creating a traveller's tale with Rory Maclean, author of Falling for Icarus and Stalin's Nose

The workshops include practical writing sessions. Participants should bring pen and paper – they will be expected to write! The emphasis is – whether you are a beginner or already have some writing experience – on developing skills which can be applied to both articles and books. Our aim is that, by the end of the day, each of you will have the tools to produce a publishable piece of travel writing.

We hope to build up a community of those interested in travel writing, by providing opportunities for participants to submit work they have completed after the course for further expert comment. You will also be able to move on to more advanced workshops, suiting the particular focus of your writing.

Participants will also be invited to exchange email details, in the hope that you may benefit from continued mutual support and positive criticism.

To apply for a place on the Travel Writing Workshop, see:

• www.deabirkett.com
• www.rorymaclean.com
• www.guardian.co.uk/newsroom

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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