tourism

Tourists have been staying away from Queensland because of the recent flooding. Now the state and federal governments, as well as Tourism Australia, are hoping that one person can bring them back. That person is Oprah Winfrey.

Brazilian and Colombian tourists are storming Miami's malls with the cry "Deme dos!", or "Give me two!" The weak dollar means that Latin Americans have started calling Miami "Marmall" (meaning mar, or sea, in the mornings, and the shopping mall at night). 

Interactive city guides are not new, but Dublin Tourism is claiming a first with a mobile-phone application that allows users to get information on 1,400 places of interest. The organization is expecting 100,000 downloads of the app this year.

Japan's stagnant economy is getting a boost from hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists. They want to show off their newfound wealth by buying classic Japanese goods, from Canon digital cameras to Seiko watches to Shiseido cosmetics.

Robert Crawford, who wrote The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography, says that Scotland's national poet shares with the best hip-hop artists a genius for rhymes that are completely "liberated from the hegemony of standard English".

Using the word "naught", which means "nothing" or "zero", one group ran a campaign to popularize "the Naughties" as the old decade's name, but without much success. Other proposed names include "the Nils" and "Nillies", from "nil", meaning "nothing".

This is not a trip to Disneyland. It is a journey to the edge of civilization. Visiting Afghanistan is like visiting another century, when people lived in a very different way. You may have warm water, internet access and electricity, or you may not.