Laurent Fignon twice won the Tour de France but will be forever remembered for the one he lost – and by how much. On the final day of the 1989 Tour the Frenchman seemed assured of victory, only to lose to his American rival, Greg LeMond, by a heart-breaking eight seconds, the closest margin in [...]
When surgery was first mentioned, an operation that would remove part of my brain's right temporal lobe to cure my epilepsy, I wasn't ever terrified. It was more like: "Oh! Someone can cure it?" But I didn't want to get too excited, just in case it didn't work. That was five years ago, when I [...]
Imran Khan is crestfallen. Throughout the morning, his BlackBerry has been in a state of perpetual agitation. He is intending to spend the day delivering relief goods for those devastated by the worst floods in Pakistan's history, gathered by his new charitable fund, but another story has overtaken the public's interest in that. Instead, the [...]
Thousands of Indonesians were evacuated from the slopes of a volcano yesterday after it erupted for the first time in more than 400 years, spewing out lava and sending smoke and dust 1,500 metres into the air.
Mount Sinabung, in the north of the island of Sumatra, began erupting around midnight after rumbling for several days, [...]
Arriving in US and Italian bookstores soon: Amanda Knox's views on spirituality, and her memories of the September 11 attacks.
A book detailing the jailhouse conversations between Knox, the US student convicted of killing her flatmate, Meredith Kercher, and an Italian lawmaker will be released later this year.
Rocco Girlanda, who met Knox, 23, around last December, [...]
Soaring commodity prices and natural disasters in Russia and Pakistan have combined to put African nations and conflict-ridden countries such as Afghanistan most at risk from food shortages, according to a report released today.
Sharp price rises for wheat and other grains will hit the world's neediest countries hardest, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, as they grapple [...]
The world's largest tiger reserve, in the wilds of northern Burma, is being rapidly eroded as a businessman with links to the junta replaces trees with cash crops, according to a report published yesterday.
The Hukaung Valley Tiger Reserve in Kachin State was created in 2001 with the support of the Wildlife Conservation Society. When it [...]
When Christina McDermott was 11 years old, she had a diabetic hamster called Soda, who died. "My little brother built her a mausoleum out of chipboard," she recalls. "Unfortunately, it wasn't the sturdiest structure in the world, and one of the neighbourhood cats dug Soda up and ran off with her carcass. My mother was [...]
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a rom-com? Sure, why not? It's the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. That's the kind of crazy thing they do up here, right? It's a gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon and I'm sitting in a dingy pub basement off the Royal Mile watching a musical by an up-and-coming American comedian (Negin Farsad), which casts Israel [...]
At Ewood Park you cannot help but notice the size of the press box. It is nearly as big as its equivalent at Old Trafford – rows of seats that were installed, presumably, to accommodate the army of reporters that descended on Blackburn Rovers in their Premier League title-winning season. Most of them are empty [...]
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