Free Republic

BEIJING - Chinese authorities jittery about protests during the Mount Everest leg of the Olympic torch relay have abruptly reversed a decision to reopen Tibet to foreign tourists. Foreigners have not received permits to visit the Himalayan region since deadly anti-government riots broke out in the capital, Lhasa. Tourism authorities announced last week that foreign tour groups would be allowed in on May 1, the start of a three-day national holiday. Tour operators said Thursday, however, that the Tibetan Tourism Bureau told them this week to stop arranging trips for foreigners. They said the bureau cited the need for safe...

CAIRO, Egypt - Al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa claimed responsibility for kidnapping two Austrian tourists last month in Tunisia in an audio recording aired Monday on Al-Jazeera television. A man who identified himself as Salah Abu Mohammed said in the recording that the terrorist group kidnapped the two Austrians on Feb. 22 in retribution for Western cooperation with Israel, but said the hostages were in good health. "We tell Western tourists that at the same time they are flowing into Tunisian lands seeking joy, our brothers are being slain in Gaza by the Jews with the collaboration of the Western...

Two Belgian tourists were among three people killed, with four more Belgians injured, when gunmen opened fire on them in Yemen's Hadramut province on Friday, a local official told AFP. The tourists' Yemeni driver was also killed by the attackers in the southeastern province. The attackers were said to have targetted the tourists in the province's Do'an Valley, before fleeing the scene in a car. The tourists were travelling to the historic city of Shibam, which lies around 450 kilometres east of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. The 16th century city has been dubbed the "Manhattan of the Desert" for its...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8, 2007 – On a day as clear and sunny as the fateful one six years before, tourists and local citizens came to the Pentagon today to pay homage and honor those who lost their lives when a terrorist-controlled airliner crashed into the building Sept. 11, 2001. In hushed voices or with respectful silence, hundreds of people came to the U.S. military’s headquarters to see the crash site of American Airlines Flight 77 that left 184 people dead and a country grief-stricken. Spectators filed by the side of the building draped with a gigantic American flag in...

OSLO (Reuters) - A chunk of an Arctic glacier broke into the sea and triggered a huge wave that injured 18 people on a sightseeing boat, almost all of them British tourists, Norwegian officials said on Thursday. Four people were seriously hurt in the accident by Hornbreen glacier on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and were flown south to a hospital in Tromsoe on the mainland. The others were treated at a local hospital, mostly for minor injuries. "The glacier calved (split off) and a big wave washed over the boat," Elisabeth Bjoerge Loevold, acting governor of Svalbard, told Reuters....

"No idea," he replied in French with a bad-tempered shrug - even though he knew the nearest Starbucks coffee shop was only 50m away. Haughty indifference to tourists is as Parisian as the Louvre, yet tourist officials are hoping to eliminate that attitude, if only for one day.

MEXICO CITY (AFP) - Two armed men posing as tourists interested in snapping photos from a helicopter ditched their pilot Monday and stole the chopper, Mexican police said. The suspects, who hired the helicopter at the airport in Atizapan, Mexico, instructed the pilot to take them to an isolated area for a photo shoot. "When we got there, they told me to get out, so we could see where we were going to take the pictures. And then they pulled a gun on me, bound and gagged me, and left me there," pilot Eduardo Merito told Radio Formato 21. The...

LAS VEGAS -- There's lazy, and then there's Las Vegas lazy. In increasing numbers, Las Vegas tourists exhausted by the four miles of gluttony laid out before them are getting around on electric "mobility scooters." Don't think trendy Vespa motorbikes. Think updated wheelchairs. Forking over about $40 a day and their pride, apparently healthy tourists are cruising around Las Vegas casinos in transportation intended for the infirm. You don't have to take a step. You don't even have to put your drink down. "It was all the walking," 27-year-old Simon Lezama said on his red Merits Pioneer 3. Lezama, a...

Madrid - Holidaymakers may be ruining their favourite destinations through pollution and greenhouse gases, making the tourism industry one of the world's worst polluters, experts say. A flight to that pristine beach and a few nights in an air-conditioned hotel room, when repeated on the mass scale of modern tourism, is all it takes to put the holiday business on a polluting par with heavy industries. "Tourism is unfortunately one of the vectors of (climate) change at the moment and contributes, through its excesses, to the process of global warming," World Tourism Organisation (WTO) director general Francesco Frangialli told an...

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) -- A tour bus of U.S. senior citizens defended themselves against a group of alleged muggers, sending two of them fleeing and killing a third in the Atlantic coast city of Limon, police said on Thursday. One of the tourists _ a retired member of the U.S. military aged about 70 _ put assailant Warner Segura in a head lock and broke his clavicle after the 20-year-old and two other men armed with a knife and gun held up their tour bus Wednesday, said Luis Hernandez, the police chief of Limon, 80 miles east of...

A Canadian tour bus was attacked Saturday as sightseers in East Jerusalem became the target of protests over a disputed holy site. Palestinian youths hurled stones at the vehicle carrying vacationers during the second day of protests against excavation work at the religious compound. This bus came under attack on the second day of Palestinian protests against excavation at a religious site. (CBC) Muslims know the site as the Noble Sanctuary, which houses the al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest mosque outside Mecca. It's known to Jews as the Temple Mount, which is connected to the Western Wall, described as the holiest...

Leadership: Harry Reid has blown off President Ford's funeral because it would be "hard to cancel" his meetings with South America's leaders or put off his junket to Inca ruins. How's that for class? Reid's visit to a tourist site in Peru, instead of presenting himself as the next Senate Majority Leader at a rare state funeral, shows how little respect he has for Gerald Ford, a good man whose presidency was marked by his willingness to put duty to country first in an effort to heal a wounded nation. Not so Reid, who put his own agenda above the...

The pink plastic flamingo, a Florida-inspired icon that has been reviled as kitschy bad taste and revered as retro cool, is dead at age 49. The pop culture symbol met its demise after its manufacturer, Union Products, of Leominster, Mass., was socked with a triple economic threat -- increases in costs of electricity and plastic resin combined with loss of financing. Production ended in June, and the plant is scheduled to close Nov. 1, according to president and CEO Dennis Plante. Union Products made 250,000 of its patented plastic pink flamingos a year in addition to other garden products.

10 British tourists hurt by bombs in Turkey By Stephanie Condron and James Burleigh (Filed: 28/08/2006) Ten Britons were injured last night in a series of bomb explosions in the Turkish Mediterranean holiday resort of Marmaris. Another bomb exploded in Istanbul. In all 22 people were hurt. All 10 Britons were taken to hospital and four were said to be in a serious condition. It is believed that at least one of the Marmaris bombs went off on one of the many dolmuses - minibuses that serve as a taxi service for holidaymakers. Residents said one exploded near a McDonald's...

(VIDEO) Bus carrying Israeli Arab tourists on organized tour overturns near Egyptian town of Nuweiba. MDA crews prepare to receive casualties at Taba Terminal on Israel-Egypt border VIDEO - Several Israeli passengers were killed Tuesday afternoon and dozens were injured as a bus overturned near the Egyptian town of al-Saada near Nuweiba in Sinai. Official sources in Sinai and Israeli passengers reported that about 50 people were injured and several were killed in the accident. The Egyptian authorities reported that 11 people were killed in the accident, some of them Israelis from Arab communities in northern Israel. The accident occured...

OSLO, Norway - A bus carrying 40 elderly French tourists toppled into a ditch by a motorway in central Norway on Tuesday after passengers demanded the driver get closer to a moose grazing by the roadside so they could take snapshots, police said. One woman suffered minor injuries in the accident on the motorway about 174 miles north of Oslo, the Norwegian capital. Eager to photograph the moose "in its natural environment," the tourists had asked the driver to get closer to the animal, after which the bus skidded off the edge of the motorway, district police officer at Gudbrandsdal,...

CBGB Owner Relocating Club — Urinals Included — To Vegas This Spring Hilly Kristal vows to put on finale shows at NYC venue. Hilly Kristal's got an awful lot of packing ahead of him. The owner and operator of New York's legendary CBGB club says by mid-October, the last drinks will have been poured and the last unsigned band will have taken the stage inside the punk-rock landmark. In compliance with an agreement Kristal reached with the club's landlord last December (see "CBGB Owner, Landlord Reach Accord: Club To Close On Halloween '06"), CBGB will no longer exist on the...

A medical team worked through the night to rebuild the bodies of two conjoined twins who were successfully separated after a daylong operation, a hospital spokesman said. A calm feeling filled the operating room at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles after surgeons gently cut the last pelvic bone connecting the sisters and moved on to the reconstruction phase of the marathon operation, said hospital spokesman Steve Rutledge. "They seem to be doing fine," Rutledge said. Ten-month-old Regina and Renata Salinas Fierros spent their first moments apart when one of them was wheeled to another room late Wednesday so plastic surgeons could...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Alarmed by the relentless rise of anti-Americanism around the world, a business-backed group is trying to change the behavior that spawned an enduring stereotype of Americans abroad -- loud, arrogant, ill-dressed, ill-mannered and lacking respect for other cultures. For many years, much of the rest of the world distinguished between the United States and the American people. Americans tended to get better ratings than their country and its policies. But recent surveys show that favorable perceptions of Americans have been shrinking while views on the world's only superpower grow increasingly hostile. Enter Business for Diplomatic Action Inc....

An elderly woman has been killed in South Africa in a bush fire raging out of control on Cape Town's landmark Table Mountain. The flames are being fanned by strong winds. Thick smoke has engulfed the centre of the city as the fire spreads rapidly across the lower slopes. Firefighters are struggling to contain the blaze and a number of hikers are trapped on nearby Signal Hill.