It has now been a year and a half since I moved to France. I am not going to bore you with all the domestic challenges the move caused me, do not worry, but I need to mention this since I have only just begun to explore life in France. This post about France will [...]

at the expense of the airlines. (Don’t miss the more serious Europe-stuff in the posts below.)
Mark A.R. Kleiman summarizes a recent experience flying the friendly skies:
In general, the performance of every United employee I dealt with today convinced me that the airline has identified its basic strategic problem as an excess of customers; I plan [...]

Until a couple of days ago, I was very nearly incommunicado for two weeks. We took the kids to Italy on holiday, you see, and found ourselves in a place with no television, no internets, not even mobile-phone reception. The tiny shop at the site doesn’t even stock English-language (or any other non-Italian) newspapers, and [...]

Interesting news (via Randy McDonald) concerning a partnership between the European Space Agency and Russia to develop the Russians’ new Kliper reusable space shuttle.
It’s all but official?Russia and Europe will soon embark on a cooperative effort to build a next-generation manned space shuttle. Speaking at the Paris Air Show, in Le Bourget, France, in June, [...]

I suppose it is only a matter of time until Google Earth will be banned both for its addictive potential and its contribution to a sharp decline in desktop productivity. But given that much of Europe - and afoe - is on holiday these days, I thought I present you, our gentle readers, with the [...]

Sorting through some old books yesterday, I came across one from Amin Maaloof that I hadn’t looked at in years. So I dusted it off, and started thinking about this post.
The English title of the book is “In the Name of Identity“, but the French title “Les Identit?s meurtrieres” (Lethal Identities?) or the Catalan [...]

After so many days of posting topics related one way or another with death, perhaps it is better to get back to life. One good excuse for doing this could be the 25th International Population Conference organised by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and which opened yesterday in Tours, [...]

Today is the tenth anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica. Nearly 8,000 people died. We will not forget.
It is also, by one of those rare coincidences, the day on which the trial of Mohammed Bouyeri - a Moroccan Dutch national who is accused of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh - [...]

“Southern Europe was on heat wave alert faced with baking temperatures and drought conditions…….”
“Despite refreshing morning rainfall in Madrid, much of southern and central Spain has been sweltering in temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) for weeks, though the weekend did bring some respite.”
Unfortunately I’m in Barcelona. The temperatures aren’t much cooler, but there’s [...]

AP writes from Bratislava about how budget airlines are allowing middle-aged villagers from Central and Eastern Europe to get on an airplane for the first time. Presumably they will also allow British stag parties to enjoy piss-up weekends someplace other than Prague (or Ljubljana or Tallinn) for a change.
“British tourists can now discover Poland [...]