Man uses balloons to fly from Mandela jail to Cape Town

A South African man on Saturday successfully flew across the sea from Nelson Mandela's apartheid island prison using helium-filled giant party balloons. The six-kilometre (3.7-mile) crossing, to raise funds for a children's hospital named after the country's former President, was the first stunt of its kind from the historical site.

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Xi says Asia faces ‘new challenges’

Chinese President Xi Jinping said Sunday that Asia faced “new challenges” to its stability and warned no one should be allowed to throw the region into chaos as tensions mounted over North Korea. Xi, delivering a speech at an annual international forum on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, did not mention the crisis on the Korean Peninsula or China's territorial disputes with Japan and Southeast Asian nations. But he said there should be no tolerance for those who foster “chaos for selfish gains” and reiterated that China would “firmly” uphold its “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity”. Tensions have soared in recent weeks with North Korea threatening nuclear war after the United Nations imposed fresh sanctions over its latest atomic test and the US and South Korea launched joint war games.

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Saturn’s rings and moons claimed to be 4 b years old

The dazzling rings of Saturn and its moons are likely to be more than 4 billion years old, scientists have claimed. The finding comes after a new study of observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn, which suggests that the planet’s rings and moons formed at the same time as the rest of the solar system’s planetary bodies soon after the sun sparked into life.

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