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GUARDIAN Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:34:11 GMT
Laura Dekker cheered into final harbour of St Maarten but may not return to Netherlands after government resistance to trip
Laura Dekker, a 16-year-old Dutch sailor who has become the youngest person ever to circumnavigate the globe single-handed, has threatened never to return to the Netherlands because of the government's resistance to her adventures.
Dekker arrived on the Caribbean island of St Maarten on Saturday aboard her 38ft boat, Guppy, and admitted she sometimes wondered what she was doing during her voyage. She also described her battles with the Dutch authorities, who wanted to prevent her setting sail, as a frightening and traumatic experience and said she was discussing with her parents the possibility of moving abroad, most likely to New Zealand.
When Dekker sailed into harbour at the St Maarten yacht club late on Saturday night, aged 16 years and 123 days, she was met by crowds of wellwishers and stepped on to the dock accompanied by her mother, Babs Muller, her..
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GUARDIAN Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:50:06 GMT
Haul from last year's royal overseas tours also includes a full set of Zulu spears, according to St James's website
What do you give a prince who has pretty well everything? In the case of one individual who bumped into Prince William on a tour of Australia last year, it was a jar of Vegemite, the local equivalent of Marmite. When William went on to Canada with his bride after the royal wedding last summer, the presents included a tartan waistcoat and a flying helmet.
All well received, no doubt, along with an extensive list of other presents given to Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge and to Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall during their overseas tours last year, which have just been published by St James's Palace on their royal website.
The gifts range from the poignant (some building fragments from the wreckage of the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, which William visited following last February's disastrous earthquake) to the predictable (a wide-brimmed...
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ECONOMIST Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:00:48 GMT
LOWERING the permissible alcohol level for drivers is common enough. Banning booze on the roads altogether is plainly far more drastic. But road deaths in Brazil, for instance, have dropped by almost a third in the three years since the government told drivers to eschew even a drop. The South African government, in a bid to cut the country’s tippling, proposes to follow suit. It wants to ban all alcohol advertising. Some ministries have stopped serving booze at functions. What about banning roadside pedestrians from drinking too? Even that may be under consideration, though it is unclear how walkers weaving home from a legal drinking bout would be taken to task.In alcohol-consumption league tables, South Africa is middle-of-the-road; between half and two-thirds of its citizens never drink. But if teetotallers are excluded, South Africans may be the fifth-heaviest tipplers in the world, with each adult drinker downing on average 35 litres of pure alcohol a year, twice as much as...
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