Mount Everest will host what organizers said will be the world’s highest ever musical concert, planned by a group of cancer survivors and their supporters to help raise awareness of the disease.
A group of 38, including seven cancer survivors, plan to leave the Nepalese capital, Katmandu on Oct. 13 and trek to the 5,500-meter (18,200-foot) high Kalapathar hill for the Oct. 21 concert, said James Chippendale of the Denver, Colorado-based Love Hope Strength foundation.
Kalapathar is near the Mount Everest base camp known among trekkers for spectacular views of the mountains including the world’s highest peak.
“The concert signifies our climb back from cancer and inspire others to climb back from cancer,“ Chippendale said in Katmandu, AP reported.
“We are taking the battle against cancer to new heights.“
Chippendale, 39, from Dallas, Texas, is himself a cancer survivor who was treated in 2000 with a bone marrow transplant and has been living a healthy life since.
There are seven cancer survivors among the 38 people from the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and France who will trek to the foothills of Everest.
Money raised from the project will help buy equipment for the Bhaktapur cancer Hospital near Katmandu.
Six musicians from the United States and Britain will perform at the concert--Mike Peters of the British band The Alarm, Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats, Cy Curnin and Jamie West of the Fixx, Glen Tillbrook of the Squeeze and Nick Harper.
Chippendale said they have checked with the Guinness Book of World Records and other record books and confirmed it would be the highest concert ever.

An Egyptian film festival has rejected an Israeli production and threatened to boycott any Arab movie fest that breaks a taboo on admitting films from the Jewish state.
Organizers of the Cairo International Film Festival, which opens next month, have loudly opposed an application by Eran Kolirin’s “The Band’s Visit,“ a fictional tale of an Egyptian police band that gets stranded in Israel.
The director has said his movie, which won praise at the Munich and Cannes film festivals, sends a strong pro-peace message.
But Soheir Abdel Kader, the festival’s vice president, told AFP: “It is out of the question that an Israeli film plays here.“
The Israelis applied for a place at this year’s 31st edition of the Egyptian festival--whose motto is “to advance understanding through the language of art between all the peoples of the world“-- through the event’s representatives in Germany.
“They will no longer be on our contact list, we didn’t even answer their email,“ said Abdel Kader. “They should have known we are against the showing of an Israeli film.“

Politics and literature made for passionate bedfellows on Oct. 9 as the world’s biggest book fair opened with a boycott by bestselling Spanish authors due to a row about Catalan nationalism.
The organizers of the 59th Frankfurt Book Fair, which has made Catalonia guest of honor, said they were sorry to see the writers stay away for reasons linked to “nationalism, regionalism, vanities.“
“Almost all of the Spanish-speaking authors, including those who are Catalan, who have been invited, are not attending,“ the director of the fair Juergen Boos, said, AFP reported.
“I think this is a great pity. I would like to have had all of them here. We are anxious to see how this will turn out.“
Award-winning Catalan author Quim Monzo in his opening speech wittily criticized the political battle in Barcelona, the regional capital, that initially saw Catalan authors who write in Spanish excluded from the fair.
They were told last year that only those who wrote in Catalan could come but were then invited after all in June.
It was a case of too little, too late for leading authors like Carlos Ruiz Zafon of “The Shadow of the Wind“ fame and Javier Cercas, who wrote the moving civil war novel “Soldiers of Salamis.“
The writers have accused nationalists of hijacking the event to promote their agenda and urged hardliners to accept that both Spanish and Catalan are part of Catalonia’s culture.
“Languages and literatures should never be on the receiving end of geo-political strategies but they are--and in a big way“ said Monzo, the author of “O’Clock“ and “Self-Service,“ and a translator of Ernest Hemingway and Truman Capote.
He said he was surprised that the Fair invited not a country but a region that stretches from Spain’s Meditarannean coast to a corner of France and in some ways proudly considers itself a nation apart.
“Throughout the years, history’s largesse has not been on the side of Catalan literature. Though the political avatars have not given us much joy, Catalan writing is clearly one of the cornerstones of European culture.“
The language was banned under General Franco’s long dictatorship but is today spoken by 13 million people.
The Fair is the book world’s foremost deal-making forum and draws nearly 300,000 visitors a year.

Mural paintings dating back 11,000 years have been found in a building on a bank of the River Euphrates in northern Syria, a French archeologist said.
Archeological team leader Eric Coqueugniot said they were the oldest murals found in the Middle East, said AFP.
“Geometric paintings--black, white and red--have been found on the wall of a house in Jadeh,“ he said, adding that they were discovered in late September in a circular house with a diameter of 7.5 meters (25 feet).
The house was in a riverside village dating from the start of the neolithic era in the Middle East, some 9,000 years BC.
The researchers found numerous flint objects at the site along with a figurine of a man.

Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes

Kumtag, China’s sixth largest desert is expanding by one to four meters eastward annually, posing a threat to the Mogao Grottoes, also known as the Caves of 1,000 Buddhas, in northwestern Gansu Province.
The nearest floating dune of the desert is only 5km away from the Dunhuang city, where the grottoes locate, said Gao Hua, head of the city tourism administration, Chinaview reported.
A scientific research group has just concluded China’s first comprehensive environmental survey of the stark desert, which is found to be expanding in all directions, posing direct threat to local grassland, oasis, nature reserves and the caves, a UNESCO-listed world heritage site.
Fifteen Chinese scientists trekked across the desert in 14 days to collect first-hand geological data, and make research on the hydrology, soil condition, vegetation and environment in the desert.
Wang Jihe, head of the Gansu Desertification Prevention Bureau and also a member of the research group said that the desert is spreading its stretches of 2,500 square km between Lop Nur of northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Dunhuang city.
Kumtag’s very meaning is “sand hill“ in Uygur language. As its name suggests, it overhangs the small oasis in Dunhuang, which has nurtured the ancient culture dating back to 336 AD in the arid region.
Monitoring by the Gansu Provincial Forestry Bureau shows that the desert has devoured 6.7 square km of arable land every year in Nanhu County, Dunhuang’s fringe to confront the desert invasion.
Dunhuang is a city of 31,200 square km, of which 90 percent has surrendered to desertification.
The Mogao Grottoes, one of China’s most popular tourist destinations, were listed as a world heritage site by UNESCO in 1987. Altogether 735 caves have been found and frescos on the inside walls cover an area of 45,000 square meters. The caves also hold 2,400 colored Buddha statues.

The 1,000-year-old Kharqan Twin Towers in the Iranian city of Avaj, Qazvin province

A team of divers has discovered the wreck of an American ship that sank off the south-central Alaska coast 139 years ago.
The Torrent, carrying 155 passengers, struck a reef and sank near Port Graham in 1868. That was less than a year after the US purchased Alaska from Russia, reported Xinhua.
The men on board had been ordered to construct the first US fort on the mainland of south-central Alaska. The castaways camped on an adjacent beach for 18 days awaiting rescue.
A four-man dive team led by Steve Lloyd, owner of Anchorage’s largest independent book store, made the discovery in July but kept it hidden at the request of state officials who wanted more time to document the site.
“It’s a very significant find because it’s right after the purchase, during the transition from Russian to American authority,“ said Judy Bittner, a state historic preservation officer. “It’s the very beginning of federal presence in Alaska and the establishment of order.“
Lloyd’s team found an array of objects, from guns, cannons, shoes and plates, all hidden beneath the broad leaves of giant kelp beds. The main findings include two anchors, sections of hull and heavy bronze rudder hinges weighing about 45 kilograms.
The oldest known American shipwreck in Alaska is the Eclipse, a Yankee fur trading vessel, which sank in the Shumagin Islands on Aug. 11, 1807, south of the Alaska Peninsula. However, the ship remains have never been found till now.

One of Greece’s most modern buildings is about to become home to some of the country’s most treasured antiquities.
In a painstaking operation set to start Sunday and last up to 10 months, more than 4,000 ancient statues, friezes, and other artifacts will be eased off the Acropolis and transported by a series of three cranes to the glass-and-concrete structure near the foot of the ancient hill.
The long-awaited 20,000 square meter (215,000-square foot) museum is not due to open to the public until next autumn, wrote Cbsnews.com.
Some have criticized it for its size and its location, saying it clashes with its surroundings. But many Greeks hope the building will give a push to the government’s longstanding campaign to persuade Britain to return Parthenon sculptures currently housed in the British Museum. One of the reasons London has cited for refusing to return the antiquities is that Greece lacked proper facilities to ensure their preservation.
A British diplomat, Lord Elgin, removed the sculptures now often known as the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon in the 19th century.
A glass hall at the top of the two-story museum--with a wall of windows allowing visitors to look directly onto the 2,400-year-old Acropolis--will house the parts of the Parthenon frieze still in Athens.

Zad Moultaka

Lebanese musician Zad Moultaka will pay tribute to all slain journalists at a concert in Istanbul.
The famed composer and pianist will take to the stage on Oct. 13 at the Boiazi�i University Garanti Culture Center, reported Todayszaman.com.
The concert will also feature the song “No“ Moultaka composed in memory of the slain Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir

The Philippines’ spectacular beaches and other interesting places may soon be seen in Bollywood movies as President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo invited Indian filmmakers to consider the country as an alternative site for producing movies.
In her speech before the Indian and Filipino business forum at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai the President said Bollywood movies may soon be produced in the Philippines.
She said when she invited Indian filmmakers during a meeting, “they agreed to visit the Philippines before the end of the year to look for film locations.“ Aditya Raj Kapoor, a leading producer in India, has committed to make a movie in the Philippines within a year, she added, reported Au.biz.yahoo.com.
Tourism Secretary Durano said Kapoor pledged to produce a US$10 million Indian movie in the Philippines.
Bollywood is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based Hindi-language film industry in India. It is blending of the names Bombay (the former name of Mumbai) and Hollywood, the centre of the American film industry.
President Arroyo said the Philippines offers fine locations, creative Filipino talents, post-production houses and studios, and other technical and logistics requirements for Bollywood, one of the largest film industry in the world, which produces some 1,000 films each year.
“This is an advantage not only for investments but also as a film location site for the largest movie industry in the world Bollywood,“ she said.