Six degrees

Sir Richard Branson last week brought space tourism a few light years closer when he unveiled his business empire's first commercial spacecraft. Virgin Galactic expects to begin giving customers a taste of space in 2011, after 18 months of flight tests. On Monday, 300 wannabe astronauts who had paid a 10 per cent deposit on the US$200,000 trip were invited to see SpaceShipTwo (above) in its hangar, in California's Mojave Desert ...

The Mojave, where temperatures can top 49 degrees Celsius, has provided locations for movies such as Jurassic Park (1993), Die Hard 2 (1990) and The Hitcher (1986). The boundaries of its 57,000 square kilometres have long been defined by the presence of Yucca brevifolia, the Latin term for the Joshua tree ...

The Joshua Tree was the fifth and most successful studio album for Irish band U2. Since its 1987 release, the album has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, leading Rolling Stone magazine to suggest the work had elevated the band's status from 'heroes to superstars'. The 11th and final track, Mothers of the Disappeared, was inspired by the Argentinian protest group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo ...

The organisation is made up of mothers of those taken by government agents during the country's dirty war (1976-83). Despite the group winning a United Nations prize for human rights, one faction has developed an affinity with terrorist tactics, hailing the 2001 attacks on the United States as 'courageous' and publishing a compilation of writings by Saddam Hussein ...

Hussein, who was executed in 2006, was central to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The evidence that sparked the move, that he had been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, has since been found to be false. Feats of political spin doctoring allowed those who led the attack to defend the move, with George W. Bush adding to the confusion in 2007 by saying the late Iraqi leader had killed one of the world's most admired statesmen. Bush said, 'Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas' ...

On July 18, 2007, his 89th birthday, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela announced the formation of The Elders, a group of eminent public figures including Kofi Annan, Aung San Suu Kyi, Jimmy Carter and Li Zhaoxing. Tasked with milking the formidable influence of its members to try to resolve global problems such as climate change and HIV/Aids, the group was labelled 'a diplomatic league of superheroes' by the New York Times, which attributed the 'outsized' concept of such an enterprise to one of its co-founders and principle sponsors, flamboyant British billionaire Sir Richard Branson.