Word: summiteer
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When Sir Ranulph Fiennes first attempted to scale Mount Everest in 2005, he suffered a heart attack 1,000 ft. from the summit (29,029 ft., or 8,848 m, above sea level). Three years later, exhaustion foiled a second attempt at virtually the same height. But on May 21, the 65-year-old British adventurer (and third cousin of actors Joseph and Ralph Fiennes) finally scaled Everest, making him the first man to conquer the world's highest peak and cross the North and South Poles unaided. "I get vertigo and don't like looking down," he says...
...When you reached the summit, you told reporters via radio that you "felt dreadful." What was wrong? The problems are too numerous to put your finger on. There is something called crotch rot [a fungal infection of the groin region], which is very painful. Luckily there's a cream for everything...
...tact, however, Boutros-Ghali is not averse to holding up a mirror to the rich nations every once in a while. On the eve of last month's G-20 summit in London, he warned that giant stimulus plans like those announced by the U.S. and the U.K. could lead to a humanitarian catastrophe in the developing world, because borrowing by rich countries would divert funds from the poor. "People are going to die, babies are not going to get the proper nourishment," Boutros-Ghali said. "Poverty is at the doorstep, something needs to be done." (See pictures of poverty...
...warnings, echoed by prominent economists, were heeded. At the London summit, the rich nations, wrangled by U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, decided to triple the IMF's resources to $750 billion. After nearly a decade on the sidelines, it was suddenly a player again. "The IMF is back," crowed IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Boutros-Ghali is more cautious: "Now we need to make sure the money shows up, that it wasn't just pious words." (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Russian leaders have also expressed concerns about the E.U.'s Eastern Partnership program, which was unveiled earlier this month and aims to deepen economic and political ties with six former Soviet states, including Ukraine. At the E.U.-Russia summit in Khabarovsk over the weekend, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said E.U. officials had "failed to persuade" him that it was not harmful to Russian interests. "What confuses me is that some states ... see this partnership as a partnership against Russia," he said...