The Flemish newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws (which of course means “the latest news”) is a unique beast: tabloidy in the range of news items it chooses to cover, to be sure, but at the same time lacking that sleazy tinge common to most of the world’s gutter-rags. Even better, it can be relied upon to catch and publish those bizarre tid-bits flowing on the wires that more established papers usually choose to leave alone.

A case in point is the recent attention it has paid to the operations of Southwest Airlines, no less. That American low-budget airline would seem to have little of interest to residents of Belgium. Nevertheless, it is covered by HLN in some recent stories whose common denominator is the apparent resiliance of its planes towards a variety of threats.

Like a well-endowed female passenger displaying rather too much endowment. This happened at the airport in Las Vegas (where else?), where the lady wanted to board a plane for New York, but was told by Southwest officials that her bosom was just too visible. Somehow the woman (known only by “Avital”) managed to board the flight anyway – maybe she used them as a battering-ram – and later recounted the experience to the website Jezebel.com, exclaiming “And what do you know, the plane did not fall from the sky!”

Then, a little earlier, there was that other grave threat to flight safety: mobile telephone use. This involved a Southwest flight from Phoenix, AZ to El Paso: a man who rebuffed requests from a stewardess to switch off his phone while the plane was landing was promptly arrested once it was down on the ground. As the HLN article explains, “The [telephone's] signals can create disturbances, and the pilot’s aids during bad weather can be influenced by a gsm telephone.” But this assertion has of course been debunked repeatedly, such as here.

So, what the Flemish paper De Morgen calls Europe’s koningskoppel (“royal couple,” namely Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy) met yesterday in Paris to try to find some solutions for the ongoing European euro/sovereign-debt crisis. What did they come up with?

Precious little, by most accounts. Perhaps that was the best to be expected, given how hard it is to get anything done in most parts of Europe in high summer-holiday season, and the fact that both, in effect, had terminated their own vacations early to meet.

(And no, rest assured that Chancellor Merkel does not regard such trips to the City of Light as recreational in any respect. Still, from the various photos emanating from that summit – check out for example this one from the De Morgen piece – one could even get the impression that they have become more comfortable in each other’s presence, something that was a problem before, as has been noted in this space.)

Continuing the beach theme, here’s one reaction, from Het Laatste Nieuws:

#geld Merkel en Sarkozy strooien zand in de ogen van de mensen: De plannen van de Franse president Nicolas Sarko… http://t.co/1cJEZ9c

August 17, 2011 8:41 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

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HLN Live

“Merkel and Sarkozy throw sand in people’s eyes” – but who is saying that? The HLN editors? No, that comes from former Belgian premier (now in the European Parliament) Guy Verhofstadt. He’s sort of a nerdy political guy – there’s a great shot of him in that HLN article, together with yet another shot of Merkel and Sarkozy posing happily together – but has been a prominent figure on the Belgian political scene for quite a while, and on the European level is mainly known as a convinced federalist. (more…)