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Stickers ban free sex on tourist island BANGKOK, Apr 29 (TNA) - Tourists arriving on Thailand's southern resort island of Pha-ngan are to be issued with stickers stating the island's ban on 'free sex', following government concern over visitors having sexual intercourse in public places.The decision follows pleas by Khon Kaen Senator Rabiabrat Pongpanit to prevent tourists on the island having sex in public after the island's notorious Full Moon parties.Today Mr. Pramoth Supyen, Director of the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT)'s Southern Office Region 5, warned that although it would be difficult to ban the parties, which were...

Jan 20, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.comby staff reportsDavid H. Smith, Newsbriefs Correspondent ZIMBABWE WANTS FAT AMERICAN TOURISTS TO WORK OFF POUNDS ON PLANTATIONS FreeMarketNews.Com, Jan. 20, 2005 - Zimbabwe is lurching toward another in a series of domestic crises it has endured over the years, under the despotic rule of Robert Mugabe. Inflation is currently running at around 150%, interest rates exceed 100% and unemployment is over 70%. Even the IMF has refused to lend more money to the endless financial sink that this once economically vibrant and self-sustaining nation has become. In an interview with Zimbabwe Independent, President Mugabe presented...

PATONG, Thailand (AFP) - A second surge of tsunami terror is hitting southern Thailand, but this time it is a wave of foreign ghosts terrifying locals in what health experts described as an outpouring of delayed mass trauma. AFP Photo AP Photo Slideshow: Asian Tsunami Disaster Tales of ghost sightings in the six worst hit southern provinces have become endemic, with many locals saying they are too terrified to venture near the beach or into the ocean. Spooked volunteer body searchers on the resort areas of Phi Phi island and Khao Lak are reported to have looked for tourists heard...

Tourists run for their lives as the first of six tsunamis starts to roll towards Hat Rai Lay Beach, near Krabi in southern Thailand. One woman runs towards the waves. Photo: AFP The woman continues to run as the wave advances.Photo: AFP With the waves engulfing boats, the woman makes contact with her group. It is not known if they survived.Photo: AFP

‘Water started to go funny,’ 10-year-old recalls LONDON - A 10-year-old British girl saved 100 other tourists from the Asian tsunami having warned them a giant mass of water was on its way after learning about the phenomenon weeks earlier at school, a newspaper reported. “I was on the beach and the water started to go funny,” Tilly Smith told the Sun at the weekend from Phuket, Thailand. “There were bubbles and the tide went out all of a sudden. I recognized what was happening and had a feeling there was going to be a tsunami. I told mummy.”While...

PHUKET, Thailand - While volunteers struggled to collect bodies washing up on the once-pristine beaches of this upscale resort isle, ghoulish tourists rolled out their towels yesterday, doffed their bikini tops and vacationed like nothing had happened. On Patong Beach and Kata Beach - where hundreds died or disappeared four days ago - the smell of suntan lotion wafted from the shore as a new influx of tourists determinedly ignored the carnage around them, frolicking in the surf or reading under umbrellas. An indignant Russian who arrived at the Novotel Phuket Resort on the day after the tsunami loudly complained...

It seems almost impossible.Just days after the tidal wave disaster, one of the devestated beaches was returning to normal yesterday.On Sunday, Patong Beach was hit by a wall of water that swept into Phuket, claiming at least 120 lives.Parasols, chairs, and other beach paraphernalia were swept to the top of the tree-lined beach, dragging helpless holidaymakers with them. It was at this beach that six-month-old Melina Heppel, of Perth, disappeared from her father's arms when the huge wave struck.For some tourists yesterday, however, the tragedy was bedoming a memory, albiet a vivid one, as they made the most of the...

What happened to the rare tribes? SANJAY DUTTA & CHANDRIKA MAGO TUESDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2004 11:19:06 PM NEW DELHI: An enormous anthropological disaster is in the making. The killer tsunami is feared to have wiped out entire tribes — already threatened by their precariously small numbers — perhaps rendering them extinct and snapping the slender tie with a lost generation. Officials involved in rescue operations are pessimistic, but still keeping their fingers crossed for the Sentinelese and Nicobarese, the two tribes seen as bearing the brunt of the killer wave. The bigger fear is for the Sentinelese, anthropologically the most...

Last Updated: Tuesday, 28 December, 2004, 17:17 GMT E-mail this to a friend Printable version Kohl rescued as Swedes fear worst Helmut Kohl was airlifted from the roof of his flooded hotel Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was among thousands of foreign tourists caught in the tsunami disaster in southern Asia. Britons, Swiss, French, Australians, Danes, Italians, Japanese and Americans in the region were hit, but Swedes seem to be among the worst affected. Sweden's foreign minister said 1,500 were still missing, mainly in Thailand, and she feared many would not be found. Sri Lanka says its troops airlifted Mr...

Tourists venturing atop the Empire State Building have been disturbed to see horrible images of Sept. 11 greeting them in the gift shop. Two 9/11 tribute booklets adorn the top of the display stand, where news magazines and entertainment periodicals are stocked. The color pictures on the covers of the booklets show the Twin Towers engulfed in flames. There are terrified people running from the scene, and one shot actually captures the second plane plowing into the South Tower. "It's disturbing," said Alma Sanguinetti, 70, who was visiting from San Francisco.

However, the government said two thirds of the capital was under about four feet (1.2 meters) of water in some areas. About a third of the country’s 330,000 population live in the highly congested capital island. Maldives is a cluster of 1,192 tiny coral islands scattered some 800 kilometres (500 miles) across the equator and is vulnerable to any rise in sea levels. The fate of tens of thousands of tourists in the Maldives was not immediately known.

An organization called Global Exchange, based in San Francisco, promotes political tourism to Venezuela, defined in its brochure as a country where "winds of change are blowing." The introduction to the sales pitch is full of praise for the strongman Hugo Chávez, while all references and links recommended to those who might be interested are those known to be shameless propaganda appendices of the Venezuelan regime: Venezuelanalysis.com, VHeadline.com and such. Chávez's agenda, reads the brochure: "includes fighting corruption, redistributing national wealth and opposing the Free Trade Area of the Americas." My laughing aloud gave way to indignation when the brochure...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Two intoxicated female British tourists who were sexually assaulted by their Jerusalem Arab taxi driver fended him off with blows which left him hospitalized, police said Tuesday. The incident, which took place late Sunday night, began after the two tourists, who are in their 20's, were picked up by the driver from the city's popular Underground Disco and asked to be driven to the youth hostel in the Jerusalem community of Shoresh. On the way, the driver pulled over on a darkened patch of the road, and started to commit an indecent sexual act on one of the tourists, police...

BEIJING -- Authorities here are always eager to show off their accomplishments, so when Beijing hosted the World Toilet Organization conference last week, delegates were given a grand tour of the city's toilets. "But this was not just any restroom. A Viennese waltz floated around the room, ''to relax and help patrons,"

Globalterroralert.com (10/12/04): Al-Qaida supporters in London, led by the notorious Shaykh Omar Bakri Mohammed (Al-Muhajiroun) and Yasser al-Sirri (the Islamic Observation Centre), held a protest rally outside the Saudi embassy in London on October 8. Only a day after the terrorist attacks on Israeli tourists in Taba, Egypt, the militants shouted: "Taba, Taba, O' Jews! The Army of Mohammed is Coming!"http://www.globalterroralert.com/london-saudi.wmv

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- They're terms that Jersey Shore residents have used every summer to describe the tourists lining beaches and boardwalks and filling hotels and restaurants. If you are one of these tourists, it's possible you've never heard of the derogatory nicknames whispered behind your back. In other words, you might be a "bennie" or a "shoobie" and not even know it. Almost everything about the words, from their origin to the frequency of their use, is a subject of disagreement. Yet their existence is undeniable. Even as their region has cashed in on summertime visitors, every generation of...

Tourists and immigrants 'behind US bed bug plague' By Charles Laurence in New York (Filed: 21/12/2003) Bed bugs have invaded the United States for the first time in 50 years, munching their way through sleeping victims in an infestation described by pest controllers as being "out of control". European travellers and Third World immigrants are being blamed for bringing the bugs back to the US, with 28 American states reporting recent infestations. To their shame and horror, wealthy home owners and guests staying at expensive hotels have woken up covered in red, itchy welts, as well as people living in...

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Three Western tourists have been kidnapped in southeastern Iran, an Interior Ministry spokesman says. He declined to give details of the circumstances of the kidnapping or the nationalities of those involved. He told Reuters on Monday the tourists were kidnapped in the Sistan-Baluchestan province close to Iran's borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan. A spokeswoman for the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin said it was possible an unspecified number of Germans had been kidnapped but declined to provide further details. "There are indications that Germans are possibly involved. I cannot add anything else," she said. "The foreign ministry...

Uri Mayseless, 21, and Oren Simon, 22, both of Haifa, died after a northbound pickup truck crossed a double yellow line and crashed head-on into their rental car Wednesday night. The two Israeli men killed in a car crash on the Seward Highway were in Alaska on a vacation, a rabbi who spoke to their families said Friday. Mayseless was a student at Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, a prestigious academy of higher learning, said Rabbi Yossi Greenberg, head of the Lubavitch Jewish Center of Alaska. He said both were of an age when they would have just completed...