Europeans

It seemed a sweet deal: A free vacation to South America. All expenses paid, and a hefty cash bonus. Just bring a parcel back home to Europe. "I thought I had no worries," said Vera Scheerstra, recalling when her boyfriend in the Netherlands suggested the trip. "I was stupid -- and in love, I guess." For the Dutchwoman, it has turned into a life-transforming experience -- but not in any constructive sense.

Eleven European tourists kidnapped by masked bandits in southern Egypt were freed Monday after a 10-day odyssey that ended when Egyptian and Sudanese commandos swept across a remote desert landscape. Details of the rescue operation were scant. The tourists -- five Germans, five Italians and one Romanian -- and their eight Egyptian drivers and guides were released early in the day.

A maudlin but irresistible tradition has sprouted and blossomed at the British Open. Each July, somewhere on the island of Britain, throngs of golf intellectuals gather and theorize on just how in creation the European continent has not won a major golf tournament since the 1999 British Open. Pioneering discussions occurred here and there in 2004, when the drought had reached 19 majors, and in 2005, when it had hit 23.

Costly diseases, many of them related to obesity and smoking, are more prevalent among aging Americans than their European peers and add as much as $100 billion to $150 billion a year in treatment costs to the U.S. healthcare tab, a new study says. The study by researchers at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health found higher rates of several serious diseases -- including cancer, diabetes and heart disease -- among Americans 50 and older as compared with aging Europeans.

After taking a slow trolley ride that hugged its way around steep cliffs and chugged 2,500 feet up a mountain, a group of kids finally arrived at what they came to see: a 6-foot rabbit who answered to the name Snowli. According to legend, Snowli came to Earth, learned to walk, then learned to ski, thus making him the perfect role model for his very attentive audience, which was roughly made up of 4-year-olds.

Europeans and Americans have often starkly different views of each other and the world, but agree on some major issues such as promoting democracy and avoiding war with Iran, according to a survey being released today. As Western leaders try to mend rifts exacerbated since 2003 by the Iraq war, the fourth annual study of European and U.S. public opinion by the German Marshall Fund depicts a complex, wary transatlantic relationship.

Europeans are most closely related to the Stone Age hunter-gatherers who arrived on the continent 40,000 years ago -- not, as many archeologists have long surmised, the adept migrants from the Fertile Crescent who introduced agriculture to the continent 7,500 years ago. That's the conclusion of the first detailed analysis of maternally inherited DNA extracted from 24 of the migrant farmers' skeletons. The study was published Friday in the journal Science.

An Islamic extremist from Belgium has achieved a grim milestone by becoming the first female European convert to commit a suicide bombing in Iraq, police said Wednesday after arresting 15 suspects linked to the woman in Belgium and France. The 36-year-old woman died Nov. 9 in the car bombing of a U.S. military convoy after traveling with her Moroccan-born husband to Iraq to join other foreign fighters in a network led by militant kingpin Abu Musab Zarqawi, investigators said.

Twenty-nine European tourists are missing in the Sahara Desert in Algeria, and officials fear they have been attacked or kidnapped. German and Austrian police have joined the hunt for the vacationers, some of whom have not been heard from since February, officials said Monday.

Thirty-one European tourists who vanished in the Sahara Desert are being held hostage by terrorist groups, a ranking Algerian official said Wednesday. The official said the Algerian army had located the tourists. About 5,000 troops and 300 local guides were brought in to track them down. The tourists, who had set off in seven separate groups on four-wheel-drive vehicles or motorcycles, disappeared starting in mid-February. None of the tourists had employed guides.