Business Ideas

Archive for the ‘Top Stories’ Category

Rugged, volcanic Reunion is a territory of France in the Indian Ocean.

The densely-populated island once prospered from the cultivation of sugar cane, but tourism and financial aid from Paris now underpin its economy.

Reunion's culture, cuisine and ethnic mix reflect the story of its settlement. Overview

French colonists arrived on the island, then known as Bourbon, in the 1640s. Slaves from Madagascar and mainland Africa were brought in to work the island's coffee plantations. Later arrivals included labourers from south and east Asia.

The island was ruled as a colony until 1946, when it was made a "departement", or administrative unit, of France. The Reunionese are French citizens and many of them wish to remain so; independence movements have been sporadic and there is little will to sever ties with Paris.

Sugar cane was introduced during a brief period of British rule in the early 19th century. It provides the raw material for Reunion's main exports. Tourism is also important; attractions include spectacular gorges and "cirques" – natural amphitheatres surrounded by mountains.

A large wealth gap has fuelled social tensions. These spilled over into violence in 1991 when 10 people were killed in anti-government riots. Unemployment is high, particularly among the young, and migration is commonplace. Violence once again flared up in March 2009 in protest at rising food prices.

Reunion is home to one of the world's most active volcanos, the Piton de la Fournaise, which has erupted more than 170 times since the mid-17th century. Lava flows have closed roads and damaged buildings.

The territory is prone to tropical storms; a cyclone monitoring station in the capital serves the Indian Ocean region.

A landlocked country with Turkey to the west and Georgia to the north, Armenia boasts a history longer than most other European countries.

The governments of the two countries agreed to normalise relations in October 2009, although Turkey has said opening the border will depend on progress on the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.

An independent Republic of Armenia was proclaimed at the end of the first world war but was short-lived, lasting only until the beginning of the 1920s when the Bolsheviks incorporated it into the Soviet Union.

When Soviet rule collapsed in 1991, Armenia regained independence but retained a Russian military base at Gyumri.

In the mid-1990s the government embarked on an economic reform programme which brought some stability and growth. The country became a member of the Council of Europe in 2001.

Unemployment and poverty remain widespread. Armenia's economic problems are aggravated by a trade blockade imposed by neighbouring Turkey and Azerbaijan since the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Despite these problems, Armenia's economy experienced several years of double-digit growth before a sharp downturn set in in 2008.

The conflict over the predominantly Armenian-populated region in Azerbaijan overshadowed Armenia's return to independence.

Full-scale war broke out the same year as ethnic Armenians in Karabakh fought for independence, supported by troops and resources from Armenia proper. A ceasefire in place since 1994 has failed to deliver any lasting solution.

Armenia receives most of its gas supply from Russia and, like some other republics of the former Soviet Union, has had to face sharp price rises. Russian gas arrives via a pipeline running through Georgia.

Armenia has a huge diaspora and has always experienced waves of emigration, but the exodus of recent years has caused real alarm. It is estimated that Armenia has lost up to a quarter of its population since independence, as young families seek what they hope will be a better life abroad.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – For eight years, the women of Wisteria Lane battled alcoholism, cancer, cheating husbands and direct attempts on their lives, but in the TV series finale on Sunday, four “Desperate Housewives” lived a fairy tale ending.

“This street is a lot of things. Boring is not one of them,” Teri Hatcher’s Susan Delfino told the new owner of her home as she packed up and said goodbye to her infamous street as the ghosts of Wisteria Lane looked on.

Fans didn’t see what lies ahead for Susan, but they did catch glimpses into the future of her three best friends, Marcia Cross’s Bree Van de Kamp, Eva Longoria’s Gabrielle Solis and Felicity Hoffman’s Lynette Scavo. The ladies are no longer desperate, having found personal and professional success.

After being exonerated on murder charges, cookbook mogul Bree finds love with her unreasonably kind lawyer, moves to the south and becomes a politician.

Gabrielle is relieved that neither Bree nor her husband Carlos (the real killer) went to prison for murdering the stepfather who abused her as a child. In the future, she runs a successful shopping website, and she and Carlos move to a California mansion.

Lynette’s happy ending sees her back together with husband Tom and moving to New York, where Lynette becomes a CEO, and years into the future, plays in Central Park with her grandkids.

When “Desperate Housewives,” created by “Golden Girls” writer Mark Cherry, premiered in 2004, it helped rejuvenate ABC, resuscitate Teri Hatcher’s career and prove that viewers would tune into TV to watch women over 40-years-old in leading roles.

The show was an instant hit with audiences and critics, averaging more than 20 million viewers an episode and being called “the best new drama of the season and perhaps the best new comedy, too,” by the Washington Post.

In the years since, the show has experienced its highs and lows. This season, it averaged just over 8 million viewers. Of the seven Emmys the show won, six were in the first year.

EMOTIONAL RESCUE

Sunday’s final episode was filled with emotional moments including Susan’s daughter Julie and Lynette’s son Porter welcoming a baby. The women of Wisteria Lane also said goodbye to elderly neighbor Karen McCluskey who died of cancer shortly after taking the wrap in Bree’s murder trial.

Dana Delany, who appeared in seasons four through six as Katherine Mayfair, returned to offer Lynette the job that inspired her move to New York, and Renee Perry (Vanessa Williams) also found a happy ending when she married her dashing Australian boyfriend.

But over the years, the show’s storylines weren’t all so nice. They included one betrayal after another, and dramatic events like murder, freak accidents and natural disasters were commonplace.

At times, the behind-the-scenes drama has rivaled that of the scandal-plagued Wisteria Lane. In season six, Nicollette Sheridan’s Edie Britt was electrocuted when her car crashed into a telephone pole.

Sheridan filed a lawsuit against ABC alleging Marc Cherry struck her during an argument and then killed off her character. In March a judge declared a mistrial after a jury failed to reach a verdict. A retrial is set for September.

In 2005, the cast clashed on the set of a Vanity Fair magazine cover shoot, and even in recent weeks talk of a rift between Hatcher and her cast mates persist.

Unfortunately, “Desperate Housewives” isn’t actually filmed on the fictional Wisteria Lane. If it were, we could count on a happy ending.

(Reporting by Sabrina Ford; Editing By Bob Tourtellotte)

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission found workers at the North Anna plant failed to properly maintain the generator, one of four designed to keep cooling systems running in case of a power outage, the agency announced Monday. The remaining diesel-powered units operated as planned, allowing the reactors to cool after they shut down because of the earthquake, the NRC said at the time.

The plant is about 90 miles southwest of Washington and about 10 miles from the epicenter of the magnitude 5.8 quake, which was felt across much of the East Coast. There was no immediate reaction to the increased scrutiny from the plant’s owner, Richmond-based Dominion Resources, but the NRC said the company has revised its maintenance procedures since the incident.

The NRC classified the problem as one that had a low to moderate impact on safety, the third-lowest rating on its four-point scale. But the finding means the plant will be subject to additional inspections.

It is the semi-mythical piece of land sought by all politicians. But does the "centre ground" even exist? Some of Labour's sharpest minds spent their Saturday in search of it. Here's how they got on.

Philip Collins said Labour had to own up to its past mistakes on the economy, particularly Gordon Brown's "hubristic" claim to have ended boom and bust. That got a big cheer from the Progress crowd.

He also advised the party to stop trying to portray David Cameron as an "ideological vandal doing bad things on purpose" when "the truth is the opposite, he hasn't got a clue what he is doing".

"That diminishing reputation for competence is absolutely toxic for Cameron," added Mr Collins.

Peter Kellner said Labour needed to be "soothing rather than scaring people". If they had to offer change at all at the next election, it should be "soothing change", he advised.

Others argued Miliband should go for broke and that voters were fed up with triangulating politicians who only said what they thought voters wanted to hear.

The fear among this faction is that even if Labour succeeds in finding its way to the new centre ground, it will already be occupied. Not by the Conservatives necessarily, or even the Lib Dems, but by a man dressed in a penguin suit. Or worse (for them), George Galloway.

Charismatic mavericks of the left, such as Galloway, or the right, such as Marine Le Pen in France, were colonising the new centre ground across Europe, argued The Daily Telegraph's Mary Riddell, as voters turned their back on the old mainstream parties.

Even candidates such as penguin-suited Mike 'Professor Pongoo' Ferrigan were getting more votes than established parties.

(There was much sniggering on Saturday at the expense of the Lib Dem candidate beaten by Professor Pongoo in Edinburgh's local elections… but also a sense that it could have happened to anyone in the current climate.)

Ed Miliband is fully on board with those that worry party politics is dying. In his keynote speech, he warned it was in danger of becoming a minority pursuit.

He urged Labour Party members to reach out to the two-thirds of the electorate who did not vote in this month's local elections, setting them the task of restoring turnout to 1997 levels.

He knows that Labour always do badly at general elections when there is a low turnout, which is why he is so keen to ensure that the party's supporters do not disappear off the register when the move towards individual voter registration begins.

But even while he was speaking some were questioning the wisdom of his strategy. Elections expert Professor Philip Cowley tweeted that "You may as well base your strategy on raising the dead as focusing on non-voters".

In the end, of course, it will be the policies that matter, and we must wait until the autumn, and the outcome of Labour's exhaustive two-year review, to find out what they are.

But whether he opts to be bold and radical, or safe and pedestrian, one thing is certain, in keeping with every other party leader, Mr Miliband will claim to be sitting squarely in the centre ground.

He can only hope the voters have found their way there too.

LISBON (Reuters) – Diehard fans of Portugal’s Premier League soccer club Benfica can now rest in peace knowing they can be buried at a discount thanks to a deal signed between the club and the country’s largest undertakers agency.

In addition to a 12.5 percent rebate, the ultimate advantages for card-carrying Benfica fans also include having the club’s anthem performed during the funeral ceremony, having the club’s official logo chiseled on coffins or urns, as well as having the Benfica flag laid over the receptacle.

“Given the massive passion that Benfica instills, it made sense to go and talk to them to bring the club into funeral ceremonies in a professional way,” Paulo Carreira, assistant director general at Servilusa funeral home, told Reuters.

The Guinness Book of Records considered Benfica the most widely supported football club in the world in 2006, with 160,398 paid-up members.

“Funerals are part of life and the discount can be important to soften families’ financial burden these days, given the economic crisis we are in,” said Carreira, who does not support any particular club.

He added that Servilusa does not rule out broadening the offer to other clubs in the future.

(Reporting by Daniel Alvarenga)

Story By: by Bonny Wolf

A fishmonger prepares her wares at the Sydney Fish Market.

Travel often brings the unexpected. But I was unprepared to find some of the best food I’ve ever eaten in Australia.

On a recent trip, we stopped at a café for lunch. An Australian woman we had seen earlier at a sheep dairy ran over and recommended the marron salad. “What is marron?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “you know what yabbies are.”

Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more. We are in Oz — which is what the locals call Australia. And bad British food is no longer the norm.

Marron and yabbies look kind of like crawfish, in case you were wondering. At the amazing Sydney Fish Market they sit side-by-side with all kinds of seafood I’ve never heard of: Balmain bugs, blue-spotted goatfish, mud crabs and the impossibly delicious barramundi.

One of every four Australians is from somewhere else. This on a continent with fewer people than California. And most people live on the coast, so they eat a lot of fresh fish.

Aboriginal people lived here as hunter-gatherers for about 40,000 years before the British started sending criminals to Australia in 1788. Subsequent waves of immigration brought people from all over the world. War, poverty and politics brought significant numbers from Europe, Southeast Asia, India, Africa and the Middle East.

The immigrants found a climate varying from temperate to tropical where they could grow just about anything year round. The wine and olive industries flourished.

When a Sydney friend was raising her children in the late 1970s, she sent them to school with vegemite sandwiches on white bread. Now her five year-old granddaughter takes Lebanese bread with hummus. The school cafeteria serves sushi on Thursdays.

The urban food markets overflow with quince, passion fruit, and custard apples. The meat cases are filled with ox tongue and beef cheeks, wild boar and kangaroo, baskets of fresh eggs and cases of local cheese.

We had wonderful Italian meals and excellent Middle Eastern snacks, but the Asian influence is the most dramatic. Crab-filled Chinese buns with Thai basil mayonnaise, an egg net holding pork, prawns and peanuts and barramundi curry with pea eggplants, bamboo, wild ginger and holy basil.

Stunningly fresh ingredients, cultural diversity, and inventive cooking are the new norms. Australia is your basic food paradise.

Located at the crossroads of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, Europe and Africa, Spain's history and culture are made up of a rich mix of diverse elements.

Through exploration and conquest, Spain became a world power in the 16th century, and it maintained a vast overseas empire until the early 19th century.

Spain's modern history is marked by the bitterly fought Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, and the ensuing 36-year dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

After Franco's death in 1975, Spain made the transition to a democratic state and built a successful economy, with King Juan Carlos as head of state.

The constitution of 1978 enshrines respect for linguistic and cultural diversity within a united Spain. The country is divided into 17 regions which all have their own directly elected authorities. The level of autonomy afforded to each region is far from uniform. For example, Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia have special status with their own language and other rights.

Andalucia, Navarre, Valencia and the Canaries in turn have more extensive powers than some other regions. Asturias and Aragon have taken steps to consolidate language rights.

In 2006 a Catalan referendum backed by the central government gave the region greater autonomy.

The Catalans won nation status within Spain and the region's parliament gained extra powers in taxation and judicial matters. The country's regional picture is a complex and evolving one.

One of Spain's most serious domestic issues has been tension in the northern Basque region. A violent campaign by the Basque separatist group ETA has led to nearly 850 deaths over the past four decades.

Eta declared a ceasefire in March 2006 saying it wished to see the start of a democratic process for the Basque region. The move divided opinion in Spain.

Tentative moves to negotiate a lasting peace were dealt a blow when Eta carried out a deadly bomb attack at Madrid's international airport at the end of the year. In June 2007, Eta called off its ceasefire.

The group announced another ceasefire in September 2010, but this time, the government said it was not prepared to enter into negotiations unless Eta renounced violence for good.

International negotiators urged Eta to lay down its weapons at a conference in October 2011, seen as a possible prelude to Eta's dissolution. Neither the Spanish government nor Eta was officially represented.

Until 2008, the Spanish economy was regarded as one of the most dynamic within the EU. However, the mainstays of the economy were tourism and a booming housing market and construction industry, and so the global economic crisis of 2008-9 hit the country hard.

The bursting of the housing bubble tipped Spain into a severe recession and by the end of 2011 the country had an unemployment rate of nearly 23% – the highest jobless rate in Europe. Austerity measures imposed by the government in an effort to reduce the level of public debt sparked a wave of protests.

Spain shares the Iberian peninsula with Portugal and its territory includes the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands and two North African enclaves.

From Velazquez in the seventeenth century, through Goya straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth, to Picasso in the twentieth, Spain has the proudest of traditions in art.

Flamenco music and dance are widely admired around the world while Cervantes' novel Don Quixote is one of the most popular ever written.

Cinema is much loved and the films of directors such as Pedro Almodovar attract huge audiences.

The first group of South Sudanese refugees stranded for months in a camp in Sudan is on its way to the south.

About 400 people – out of a total of up to 15,000 – are being taken by bus to Khartoum from where they will be flown to the South Sudanese capital Juba.

The camp residents were last month declared a security threat by the authorities, who gave them a deadline to leave Sudan. This was later dropped.

They lost rights to Sudan nationality when the south seceded last year.

The airlift comes a day after UN human rights chief Navi Pillay condemned Sudan's bombing of bombing of South Sudan, carried out despite a UN resolution demanding an end to hostilities.

South Sudan seceded last July as part of a deal to end years of civil war.

But disputes stemming from the secession, especially over oil, led to clashes last month and fears of a return to all-out war.

On Wednesday, South Sudan accused its neighbour of continued bombing raids. Khartoum said it had the right to respond to acts of aggression.

The group of South Sudanese is being taken to Khartoum from Kosti in White Nile State, about 300km (190 miles) south of the capital.

They will be flown out of Khartoum early on Sunday morning after spending the night at a government transit centre, International Organisation for Migration (IOM) head Jill Helke told AFP news agency.

The IOM says the 15,000 have been stuck in Kosti for anything up to a year, after boat traffic south was cut because of cross-border violence.

They have been living in makeshift shelters and are entirely dependent on aid agencies as they wait for transport.

"Part of the problem has been that in the period since independence, although the people were supposed to be given a choice to leave or to become legalised, there have not been the arrangements available for people to legalise their stay in Sudan," Ms Helke told the BBC.

"And so for many the lack of choice has made them decide that going to South Sudan is their only option."

Correspondents say many of the group have never been to South Sudan, so settling there is likely to be a challenge.

Many have relatives in the south and the IOM and other humanitarian agencies will be providing some help, the aid agency said.

Hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese left Sudan after the south seceded, but about 350,000 remain.