Tag: travel

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Bravery of captain and passengers saved 174 lives

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Dubai-Tel Aviv flight Flydubai FZ1073 plunged more than 16,000 feet just over 30 seconds during its steepest descent.  Omani co-pilot Hamam Al-Hamami, who tried to crash the Flydubai flight to Israel by stabbing Indian pilot Smit Machchar (39), flight captain inside the cockpit savage attack freed after passengers and crew intervened and a reserve pilot landed the aircraft safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. It has been reported the co-pilot was already been banned from flying by Oman over concerns about radical ideological views, despite joining Flydubai.  Captain Smit Machchhar was seriously injured after multiple stab wound, realised he was not only fighting … Continue reading Bravery of captain and passengers saved 174 lives

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How culture survives when we suffer from a deficit of meaning

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The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, is one of the most important and oldest international art exhibition as the tide of change is surging, the map of Europe is redrawn, the artist ride the wave with a spirited seriousness and exuberant originality. Every two years, a selected curator is given the unique opportunity to prepare an exhibition that reflects their vision of the contemporary art of their times with artists from around the world  and that is visited by hundreds of thousands of art afficionados. Though painted red and festooned with gaudy flags and stars, the Russian pavilion contains piles of … Continue reading How culture survives when we suffer from a deficit of meaning

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Portobello Film Festival  2026 – A Return to the Radical

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The 31st Portobello Film festival screens for free more than 200 new independent films, documentaries and music films from Thursday 3 to Sunday 20 September at the Muse Portobello, 6- 10:30 pm Exploding Galaxies, Pink Floyd, David Hockney, Collecting Art Making. For more than three decades Portobello Film Festival has been celebrating independent film making and Festival culture at the original epicentre of the British Underground. Free to enter and free to attend, the festival is an annual reminder of a time when Ladbroke Grove was to London what San Francisco was to America. The area has provided the perfect condition … Continue reading Portobello Film Festival  2026 – A Return to the Radical

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Intertwined lives of those who experienced age of extremes

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In The City Without Jews, award-winning historian Douglas Smith,  explains what Viennese meant stepping beyond the limits of one’s identity into a cosmopolitan world of Kultur, where race and religion could be hidden behind a veil of refinement and achievement. Vienna was once a city in which Jews did not have to be Jews, and singular story of the destruction of Jewish Vienna as seen through the letters and diaries of an extraordinary woman who witnessed it all. In 1922, Hugo Bettauer published the novel The City Without Jews, a satirical critique of Austrian antisemitism. Three years later he would be … Continue reading Intertwined lives of those who experienced age of extremes

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101 Princesses

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Imagine what New York-based, British writer Jon Ronson did when he received a series of disquieting texts after his 24-year-old son Joel and his friends had been lured to a mysterious castle in the  rural Connecticut (forests of New England) under false pretences late one evening. Ronson Sr. off on an extraordinary adventure into a world of unmoored men on a desperate search for purpose, whatever the cost. Why did the wealthy scion of a gilded age tycoon Jon’s son to his castle on the pretext of a party, when the reality was something else entirely? Could Jon uncover what was … Continue reading 101 Princesses

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Who can survive?

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Scottish Irvine Welsh, by now quite American, after 17 years since the Trainspotting author one-time provocateur-in-chief of the British literary scene first moved stateside to Chicago, home city of his second wife, and since their divorce he has kept a house in Miami. In what ought to be constitutional impossibility, there are times when Donald Trump, recumbent in Mar-a-Lago, is just 70-miles from the man who once wrote that “Whin yir oan Junk, aw ye worry aboot is scorin”. A divided Las Vegas family is forced to confront the past and reckon with a dangerous future, although Trump is seldom … Continue reading Who can survive?

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Best Hotels in the World

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According to Tripadvisor’s Travellers’ Choice Awards for the Best of the Best Hotels in the world, out of 8 million listings, with the highest level of excellence in travel over a 12-month period the following made it to top ten: 1) G.H. UNIVERSAL HOTEL, BANDUNG, INDONESIA with its unique architecture with comfortable mattresess and scenic views, pet and children friendly hotel for family-friendly fun and first-class friendly service. 2) HOTEL COLLINE de FRANCE, GRAMADO, BRAZIL, with luxurious rooms with large beds and L’Occitane amenities, heated pool, fitness centre, spa, sauna and steam room. Live piano music during breakfast with complimentary … Continue reading Best Hotels in the World

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Lanes of London

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London Lanes is an attempt to enumerate, name and describe, as far as possible, all the lanes old and new of London. Alan Stapleton examines over 900 London Lzness and writes “In the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth the houses of London certainly climbed skywards along the narrow lanes. These houses were half-timbered buildings of sometimes eight storeys. But each storey bulged out over the next lower, so that the people on the topmost storey could almost shake hands with their neighbours across the way. Up to the end of the eighteenth century the citizens of London lived in … Continue reading Lanes of London

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Baltic crusades adapted by Nazi expansionism

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Crusading armies unleashed a relentless holy war against the last Pagan societies in northern Europe, particularly in the Baltic Sea region between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Led by Catholic rulers, churchmen, and most importantly of all, the warrior monks of the Teutonic Order, they sought to expand Christendom through conquest and conversion. In the process they forged a new world with a profound legacy that resogates into the present. Aleksander Pulskowski, professor of medieval archaeology at the UK’s university of Reading, explores how the construction of castles and towns, and the introduction of new languages, technology, monetary economies, and … Continue reading Baltic crusades adapted by Nazi expansionism

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Booms and busts covering six decades

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Jeremy Grantham entered the investment business in the ’60s, when he brought the thrifty Quaker values and Yorkshire Independence he had been raised with. While other money managers were focused on blue chip stocks, he studied the stock market history and constructed by hand the first indices for small-cap and value stocks. Charting their ebb and flow, he could see clearly the powerful force that would become central to his investment philosophy: mean reversion, “the heartbreaking principle that good times always revert back to more boring, more ordinary times.” In the early ’70s Grantham was a pioneer of index investing. … Continue reading Booms and busts covering six decades