Free Republic

To Timbuktu by flying car: it sounds the most unlikely journey on earth; a sci-fi voyage from the pages of Jules Verne. But this is no fantasy. The car really flies. And the journey will become reality early in the new year when two explorers set off from London in a propeller-powered dune buggy heading for the Sahara. The seed of this improbable adventure was sown four years ago when Gilo Cardozo, a paramotor manufacturer, had a eureka moment. For those not familiar with paramotors, picture a parachutist with a giant industrial fan strapped to his back, which provides...

MADEIRA BEACH - As they craned their necks upward, a small group of tourists noticed something was wrong with the two teenage girls parasailing together Thursday afternoon. The girls were drifting 200 to 250 feet in the air - not over the Gulf of Mexico as they should have been, but over the beach. And they were headed inland. Then the same group, made up mainly of Midwesterners, noticed the line that had connected the pair to a boat was dragging along the surface of the Gulf. It had snapped. Some heard the girls scream. Jon Shoemaker, a 34-year- old...