.Snow and icy weather has disrupted travel across Europe, closing Geneva airport on one of its busiest tourist weekends of the year and prompting a state of emergency on part of Germany’s Baltic coast.
Thousands of passengers were stranded at Geneva’s Cointrin airport after heavy overnight snow kept it closed until noon.
“It was the first time we had so much snow on the runway since 1985,” said airport spokesman Bertrand Staempfli as departures began at midday.
Many British, German and other European skiers use Geneva airport to reach popular Swiss and French ski resorts in the close toby Alpine region, including Verbier.
Delays were expected as frustrated passengers queued to re-book flights at the airport, where 100,000 people had been due to transit over the weekend.
Schools across the state will stay closed on Monday.
Hundreds of motorists had to abandon their cars in the north-eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where 25 centimetres of snow fell and the district of Ostvorpommern declared a state of emergency, local authorities said.
Levees in parts of the neighbouring state of Schleswig-Holstein showed cracks on Sunday, threatening low-lying areas with floods, police said.
In Poland, at least 200,000 households suffered a power outage and shoppers and workers were evacuated from a shopping centre in the western city of Leszno when its roof began to give way under 1. Coastal towns like Flensburg and Travemuende had suffered flooding by afternoon.
A police spokesman said that since the onset of cold weather in October, 152 people had been found frozen to death in Poland.5 metres of snow, rescue services said. .
- Cars trapped -
On Germany’s Baltic island of Fehmarn, some 5,000 residents were shut in by the blizzards, while scores were trapped in their cars for hours on the A20 autobahn because normal snow ploughs could not reach them, authorities said.
The weather had caused over 1,100 road accidents between Saturday and Sunday morning in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, according to the regional government.
The weather had caused over 1,100 road accidents between Saturday and Sunday morning in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, according to the regional government.
In the south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, snow caused more than 900 road accidents between Friday and midday on Sunday, seriously injuring 15 people and causing 4 million euros of damage, the regional interior ministry said. At least 16 people have been badly injured in the state due to the snow since Saturday.
In Britain, chemical firm Ineos said it had diverted 12,000 tonnes of salt for use on British roads that had originally been destined for Germany.
Ninety-one flights were cancelled on Sunday at Frankfurt airport, Germany’s busiest, compared to 225 the day before.
The government told local authorities to reduce the amount of salt they put on roads by a quarter at the end of last week in a bid to conserve supplies.
“Because we’ve been inundated with calls from local authorities, we’ve decided to retain the supplies in the UK,” a spokesman said.
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.A work by French impressionist artist Edgar Degas was stolen from a museum on Wednesday night in Marseille in southern France, the city’s prosecutor said.
The pastel, named Les Choristes (The Chorus), was worth an estimated 800,000 euros ($1. .2 million), the prosecutor said.
“The disappearance of this very expensive painting was discovered when the museum opened on Thursday morning.
The work belonged to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and had been loaned to Marseille’s Cantini museum for an exhibition that was due to close on January 3.
The Musee d’Orsay, which has been loaning out many works in recent months to raise funds, declined to comment on the theft. There do not seem to be any signs of breaking and entering,” Marseille public prosecutor Jacques Dallest said.
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.Two women have died and 47 others were hurt in a bus crash in the south of England as ice and snow continues to throw the UK’s transport systems into chaos.
Snow and ice on the runways caused many flights to be cancelled.
All 129 passengers were taken off the plane and no injuries were reported.
A Ryanair plane overshot the runway as it landed at Prestwick Airport in the west of Scotland.
Thousands of people left stranded by a three-day Eurostar service cancellation formed long queues at London’s Saint Pancras International Station in the hope of finally getting to the continent.
As snow turns to ice, traffic conditions have become treacherous.
All Eurostar’s trains for Wednesday filled up by lunchtime.
Tempers frayed amid confusion over who would get priority on the reduced number of trains that began running on Tuesday.
Passengers were urged to turn up an hour early. The operator said it would continue to run a modified timetable on Thursday.
Meanwhile, floodwaters drenched most of Venice, as a combination of wind, rain and the lagoon city’s periodic tidal phenomenon saw water levels rise by 143 centimetres, a record for the year, officials said.
Many online shoppers shoppers in the UK have been told not to expect their goods by Christmas after snow stalled deliveries.
Heavy rains closed motorways in southern Spain and Portugal, where power lines were also cut by heavy winds overnight. .
In northern Germany, a seven-year-old boy was stopped by police, driving back to a parking lot having ploughed the snow off the street with his parents’ front loader.
Snowfall also forced school closures in northern Spain.
- ABC/AFP
.Services have returned almost to normal after three days of chaos on the Eurostar rail link between the UK and France.
But many parts of Europe continue to face severe transport disruptions and there have been more deaths as a severe cold snap sweeps the continent.
More than 80 people have died across Europe, including 42 in Poland and another 27 in Ukraine who have frozen to death.
Air, rail and road transport has been severely disrupted across northern Europe where as much as 50 centimetres of snow has fallen with more expected in the coming days.
Another 13 people died in car accidents in Austria, Finland and Germany, where temperatures dropped well below zero.
More freezing fog was expected at Stansted, north of London, and forecasters from Britain’s Met Office also issued severe weather warnings across the country, warning of icy roads and thick snow in eastern Scotland.
But after three days of cancelled services, Eurostar trains began running again between Brussels, Paris and London: an investigation has been launched into the disruption of services.
Britain’s Automobile Association said Monday was their busiest night for 25 years, with about 700 calls received every hour.
“There was no way that I was going to throw customers out into that,” said store managing director Deborah Strazza.
In Buckinghamshire, west of London, about 100 people, including 20 children, spent the night in the John Lewis department store after being snowed in.”
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.Thousands of French internet users have flooded video sharing websites to enjoy a lampoon of their glamorous first couple, almost a week after they appeared on the US show, The Simpsons.
Cartoon caricatures of President Nicolas Sarkozy and first lady Carla Bruni starred in an episode of the animated show on November 15 in an episode entitled The Devil Wears Nada.
In the show, bungling paterfamilias Homer Simpson and his colleague Carl Carlson visit Paris and bump into Ms Bruni, a cigarette-smoking femme fatale in a stylish ballgown, at a high-society reception.
Their cameos passed largely unnoticed in France until Friday, when news websites started linking to pirated clips of the episode, creating a buzz which saw more than 117,000 fans linking to the DailyMotion site alone.”
Later, after Carl threatens to have Homer sacked, the hero declares: “You know that woman you’ve been playing hide the baguette with? That’s the first lady of France, Carla Bruni!
“If you fire me I’ll call President Sarkozy and he’ll be all over you like Truffaut on Hitchcock,” Homer warns, in a dig at French cinema’s supposed debt to American models.
After a brief exchange of pleasantries, the Bruni character throws herself into Carl’s arms and declares: “I want to make love, right now. .
When Carl doubts the threat, Homer calls Mr Sarkozy’s office and we see the French leader at his desk with a portion of camembert and his sultry wife.
But while Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair and Fox network owner Rupert Murdoch recorded their own voices for their appearances and escaped with a gentle ribbing, the harsher Sarkozy parody appeared without their consent.
This is not the first time The Simpsons has mocked the French - the show famously popularised the taunt “cheese-eating surrender monkey” - or leading world figures.
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.Ninety-six shoe addicts have signed up for Friday’s Stiletto Championship, which takes place after office hours on an indoor track in the old stock exchange building in central Paris.
The only rule is to be perched on heels at least eight centimetres high. The prize is boxes and boxes of shoes.
“Walking on heels is no piece of cake.
“The finalists are training very seriously,” said Caroline Gentien, who works for the online shoe sale site that came up with the idea.
“We came up with the idea just two years ago.”
The finalists hail from all over France and made it into the glam challenge after a series of regional races. This year, 400 candidates signed up for the regional races,” Ms Gentien said.
The race, being run at 9:30pm (local time), is a three-part relay over 180 metres involving 32 teams of three with names such as “Yes We Can”, “Sexpistols” and “Superwoman”.
The prize is 3,000 euros worth of shoes.
Winners of the 2008 race will be competing again this year - a TV journalist, a psychologist, and a lawyer competing under the name “Talk To My Foot”.
Volunteers from the Red Cross will be standing by in case of accident, but last year’s competition wound up without a single twisted ankle.
“The only training we do is running to catch a train or a bus every day.
“We all love shoes and we love having fun,” said journalist Dorothee Kristy, 29.”
Also taking part in the race is stiletto school “Talons Academy”, a private business that doles out tips on how to walk in heels without hurting one’s back or ankles.”
Also taking part in the race is stiletto school “Talons Academy”, a private business that doles out tips on how to walk in heels without hurting one’s back or ankles. They go to a rendezvous in flat shoes and put their stilettos on at the last minute,” she added.
“Or else they cheat.”
The trick for Friday’s contestants, she says, is “mastering the half-turn.
“It’s true that it is harder to find your balance on heels. You have to get it right for each foot. .”
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. Stilettos is all about technique
.The 16 nations of the Eurozone have officially grown their economies by 0.4 of a per cent, meaning the zone is officially out of recession.
The new figure means that on average Eurozone countries have emerged from recession faster than earlier predicted, but the powerhouse nations of Germany and France have recorded a recovery below expectations.7 per cent and France just 0.
The German economy grew by 0.
The Spanish economy is trailing and is still in recession.2 per cent.
Though not in the Eurozone, Britain too is lagging behind other European countries and is still in recession after recording six consecutive quarters of negative growth. .
It is Britain’s worst result since quarterly figures were first gathered in 1955
.Former world number one Marat Safin, in his final tournament before retiring, has squeezed past French qualifier Thierry Ascione 6-4, 4-6, 7-6 in a Paris Masters first-round match.
The gifted but erratic Russian, who has been hampered by injuries in recent years and has dropped out of the top 50, was forced to save three match points.
He eventually went on to take the tie-break 7-3 with a forehand volley on the first match point to seal victory after an hour and 52 minutes of relatively dull tennis.
The 29-year-old Safin, who has lifted the Paris Masters trophy three times but is without a tournament win since the 2005 Australian Open, saved three match points with aces at 5-4 down in the final set. “I always came here to win but this time, frankly, I don’t think I can do that.
“The tennis I’m playing at the moment is not the best of my career,” Safin told reporters.”
One of the world’s most spectacular players when on song, Safin faces a tough task in the second round against US Open champion Juan Martin del Potro.
“I’ll just try to finish on a high note and say goodbye to everybody.
- Traded breaks -
Safin broke in the fifth game before winning the first set in 29 minutes. .
Both men looked equally clumsy in the deciding set until the unseeded Safin stepped up a gear in the closing stages.
The pair traded breaks early in the second before the Russian dropped his serve in the 10th game, losing the set by hitting a forehand long.
Czech Berdych, who won the indoor event in 2005, struggled at times against an opponent ranked outside the top 200.
Earlier, former champion Tomas Berdych recorded a 6-3, 7-6 victory over another French qualifier, Vincent Millot.
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The world number 20 next plays Spaniard Tommy Robredo, seeded 14
.French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who helped shape Western thinking about human civilisation, has died at the age of 100.
Levi-Strauss died on Friday and was buried at a private service in the Burgundy village of Lignerolles, where he had a house, senior colleagues said.
“Two years ago he broke his hip and he had been very tired ever since.
Trained as a philosopher, Levi-Strauss shot to prominence with his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques (A World on the Wane), a haunting account of travels and studies in the Amazon basin and one of the 20th century’s major works. He died at a grand old age,” said Philippe Desacola, his successor as head of the social anthropology laboratory at the College of France research institute.
The French leader described him as a “very great scholar, always open to the world, who created modern anthropology and raised the reputation of French human and social sciences to its highest level.
Paying tribute, French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave “homage to a tireless humanist, a curious academic who was always in search of new knowledge, to a man free of any sectarianism or indoctrination”.”
Levi-Strauss was a leading proponent of structuralism, which sought to uncover the hidden, unconscious or primitive patterns of thought believed to determine the outer reality of human culture and relationships.
French academia and the cultural elite marked his 100th birthday last year, paying homage to Levi-Strauss with a program of films, lectures and reflection on his contribution to modern thinking.
Structuralism was also, Levi-Strauss liked to say, “the search for unsuspected harmonies”.
He was the oldest member of France’s prestigious Academie of leading intellectuals, a respected but retiring figure, who had said he no longer felt at home on an overpopulated planet.
Among the more striking conclusions of his work was the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the belief systems and myths of so-called “primitive” races and those of modern Western societies.
“What I see are the current devastation, the frightening disappearances of living species, be they plants or animals.
- No longer at home -
In a 2005 television interview, Levi-Strauss expressed worry about ending his days in “this world that I do not love”. Because of its current density, the human species is living in a type of internally poisonous regime. Because of its current density, the human species is living in a type of internally poisonous regime.
He studied the lives of the tribes of the Mato Grosso and the Amazonian rainforest, collecting material for theories on the underlying structures of human relationships and myths shared by various cultures. He studied philosophy and in 1935 went to Brazil, where he became a professor at the University of Sao Paolo.
He was given the chair in social anthropology at the College de France in 1959, where he worked until retirement in 1982.
Returning to France in 1939 he was conscripted, but after the Nazi invasion he was, as a Jew, forced to flee to the United States, where he taught while awaiting his chance to return home and restart his career.
“He had an ecological approach to the world and to individuals that was ahead of its time.
“Straddling the worlds of philosophy and science, his work is essential for any attempt to reflect on our society and how it works,” said Denis Bertholet, one of Levi-Strauss’ biographers.
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Butcher Leon Russell thinks the brazen thief who pinched a Breast Cancer Foundation collection box from his Lower Hutt shop is “bloody low”.
Security footage from the Mad Butcher in-store camera shows a man sliding the distinctive pink box off the counter into a supermarket trolley and walking out.
“It’s pretty disappointing, bloody low to steal from a charity,” Mr Russell said. . “It probably had about $100 in it already.
The incident, which happened about 2pm on Wednesday, has been reported to police.
He had paid for some meat, then moved to the other cash register, which was unattended, and waited until the shop assistant was busy with another customer before stealing the box.
Suzanne McNicol of the Breast Cancer Foundation said it was the first time to her knowledge that a collection box had been stolen.