A Cork man is aiming to achieve a new record, when he flies from Ireland to Africa this summer on a craft that is powered by a lawnmower engine.

ON JUNE 20, 1631, ‘Barbary’ pirates raided Baltimore, taking 107 men, women, and children into slavery. It was the largest such raid on an Irish or British settlement since Viking times, writes Richard Collins

This weekend, I will visit one of my sons in historic St Alban’s in Hertfordshire, England. 

A century after the first such event, hundreds of people will take to the water in Cork city centre tomorrow for the Lee Swim.

A Cork teenager has broken the Irish women’s record for one of the world’s toughest open-water swims.

A record-breaking marathon swimmer has embarked on what he says will be his final epic challenge — bidding to become the first person to swim the 80km from Ireland and Wales.

A documentary on Steve Redmond’s attempts to became the first person to swim some of the world’s most treacherous waters has wowed audiences at a major film festival.

A quadruple amputee has swum the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco as part of an effort to swim between all the world’s continents.

BIRD-WATCHING in Morocco last week I encountered some magpies.

A 17-tonne trove of silver coins recovered from a Spanish galleon that was sunk off Portugal in 1804 was flown from the US to Spain yesterday, concluding almost five years of legal struggling.

OH TO be in Africa where the great herds of wildebeest are crossing the Serengeti and the Masai Mara on their annual migration.

TODAY, when we woke and opened the curtains, the skies over the Straits of Gibraltar were again peerless blue. The sea, azure and sparkling below them, broke on the sand in a white, crinoline frill.

David Walliams is still suffering from the after-effects of his charity Thames swim.

A cold winter a-comin’, after a pathetic summer?

'Little Britain' star David Walliams is braving raw sewage and deadly diseases to raise money for Sport Relief by swimming the entire length of the Thames.

THE first night in this tropical land of The Gambia in West Africa we ate in the company of hundreds of white butterflies.

LAST week, in glorious weather, we walked the headlands of west Cork. On Three Castles Head, beyond Barley Cove, we found lizards basking on the walls of the collapsed 15th century bawn, golden lizards, sharp-eyed and fast, disappearing between the stones at the hint of a footfall or shadow.

RUSSIAN navy vessels were patrolling the Atlantic yesterday in search of a Maltese-flagged ship that has been missing for more than two weeks since sailing through the English Channel.

Two Russian warships will join Nato’s anti-terrorist patrols in the Mediterranean this week.

At least 20 people were killed when four explosions tore through the Moroccan coastal city of Casablanca damaging a synagogue, the Belgian consulate and a Spanish restaurant, officials said.

Spanish forces have evicted a unit of Moroccan soldiers from a disputed Mediterranean island, the Spanish news agency Efe said today.