Western Europe

Rescue workers continued to search Monday for victims of a powerful weekend storm that combined with high spring tides to batter France's Atlantic coast, killing at least 62 people in Western Europe. By Monday evening 51 deaths had been reported in France. Most of the victims drowned in their homes early Sunday morning, officials said. At least 11 more people died in other Western European nations as a result of the storm named Xynthia. Warnings had been issued by Friday evening in France for people to stay off beaches and coastal roads, but hundreds were surprised in their homes in the middle of the night by surging waters that smashed through aging sea walls.

The United States logged 222 measles cases last year, well above the median of 60 cases a year that has been the norm during the last decade and the most cases since the 508 cases that occurred in 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. Most of the new cases were clustered in 17 outbreaks, about four times the normal number. All were the result of imported virus, either by U.S. citizens returning from vacations or by foreign visitors. About half of the cases originated in Western Europe.

More than anything else, a 20-year span between visits to Moscow, first by President Charles de Gaulle and now by President Francois Mitterrand, demonstrates the validity of the French cliche, "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose"-- the more things change, the more they stay the same. Of course things have changed--how could they not, across 20 years of the Space Age, 40 years after World War II?

Shanghai was at the top and Sacramento near the bottom of new rankings of the world's best- and worst-performing metropolitan economies last year by the Brookings Institution. The rankings of the 200 largest metro areas that account for nearly half of the entire global economy underscore how the Great Recession has accelerated the shift in economic strength from the West to the East, and from industrialized countries to developing nations in Asia and South America. In Brookings' list, released Wednesday, 90% of the world's fastest-growing economies were outside North America and Western Europe.

Whipping winds and heavy rain pounded much of Western Europe on Monday, flooding villages, damaging buildings and prompting officials in some places to cancel flights. At least six people were killed. In Britain, three southern rivers had overflowed by Monday afternoon, and two people died when a car was struck by a falling tree.

Foreign ministers from the 12 European Community nations have agreed to send about $70 million in emergency food and medical aid to Romania and Poland, officials here said Sunday. After a four-hour meeting Saturday night in Dublin Castle, the foreign ministers said they will send shipments of beef, butter, olive oil, grain and medical supplies to Romania and food products to Poland. The final details of the aid packages will be worked out later this week, the officials said.

European Community bureaucrats, among the most handsomely paid of their kind in the world, began a two-day strike to retain that status. Many of the 25,000 "Eurocrats" stayed away from their jobs and sharply curtailed EC activities in Brussels. In Luxembourg, pickets demonstrated outside but did not disrupt a meeting of EC foreign ministers discussing ways to establish a common foreign and defense policy for the 12 countries.

It is now a virtual certainty that the rich democracies of Western Europe will fail in one of their major political goals of the 1990s: halving the region's crippling unemployment rates by the end of the century. And as expectations drop, there is mounting concern about the prospects of making any substantial progress at all in reducing what is widely acknowledged as the region's single most serious social problem.

Workers in Western Europe have bargained their way to the longest annual paid vacations, while their American counterparts have the shortest vacations and the Japanese have to be persuaded to take time off, according to an International Labor Organization report published Tuesday. The study shows that legislation and collective bargaining have lengthened vacations in Europe, but there is little movement in this direction in the United States.

ISSUE: The Dutch economy, highly dependent on trade, has been hit hard this year by the recession in Western Europe and disruptions in the European currency system. Recently, the Netherlands government has embarked on a campaign to lure more foreign investment, preferably from outside Europe, to shore up its economy. Recent delegations have toured the United States and Asia.

"Prince of Persia" didn't exactly get a royal reception overseas this weekend. Walt Disney Studios' big-budget video game adaptation starring Jake Gyllenhaal opened in 19 foreign markets, including every major European country except France, one week ahead of its Memorial Day weekend debut in the U.S. and the rest of the world. The film sold a studio-estimated $18 million worth of tickets. That's 5% more than the opening of "National Treasure" in the same countries in 2004, but 13% less than the original "Iron Man" in 2008 and 24% less than 2005's historical epic "Kingdom of Heaven."

The Conservative-led government that got down to the business of running Britain on Thursday is the latest manifestation of a rightward tilt of politics across Europe. With David Cameron ensconced as prime minister here after 13 years of Labor rule, center-right parties or coalitions now have the upper hand in Western Europe's most populous countries: Germany, France, Britain and Italy. They also rule several Eastern European nations, such as Poland and Hungary, while on the Iberian Peninsula, the Socialist governments of Spain and Portugal are struggling to fend off gains by conservative opponents.

Last week's British election was important as much for what didn't happen as for what did. The opposition Conservative Party won the most votes, but it didn't win a clear majority of seats in Parliament. The third-party Liberal Democrats, who hoped to surge into second place ahead of the deflated Labor government, fell short. As British television pundits noted, it was a reverse trifecta: All three parties lost. All politics is local, of course, but Britain's grouchy electorate sent a message that has echoes in the rest of Europe and even the United States: Voters aren't looking for massive change right now; they're looking for leaders who can find a safe way out of a deep economic crisis that never seems to end. Thirty years ago, when Ronald Reagan won an election in the United States on the heels of Margaret Thatcher's victory in Britain, it was possible to talk about a wave of conservative politics sweeping the Western world — especially since Reagan and Thatcher shared a common passion for downsizing the liberal welfare state.

Rescue workers continued to search Monday for victims of a powerful weekend storm that combined with high spring tides to batter France's Atlantic coast, killing at least 62 people in Western Europe. By Monday evening 51 deaths had been reported in France. Most of the victims drowned in their homes early Sunday morning, officials said. At least 11 more people died in other Western European nations as a result of the storm named Xynthia. Warnings had been issued by Friday evening in France for people to stay off beaches and coastal roads, but hundreds were surprised in their homes in the middle of the night by surging waters that smashed through aging sea walls.

When an author with Christopher Caldwell's impeccable conservative credentials glosses Edmund Burke in his book's title, it's a safe bet that he's engaged a question whose implications he believes are absolutely fundamental. Burke's great masterpiece of political criticism -- "Reflections on the Revolution in France" -- is, after all, both the foundational text of contemporary conservatism and a continuing inspiration to classical liberals. Caldwell's closely argued thesis in "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West" is that the massive migration of Muslim immigrants into Western Europe now represents as much of a consequential break with Europe's cultural traditions as the utopian rationalism of revolutionary France did for Burke.

Like many spy tales in fiction and reality, "Background to Danger" begins in a train station. A down-and-out freelance journalist awaits a night train alone on a platform in Nuremberg, Germany, hands in overcoat pockets, shoulders hunched against a November wind. Soon a frightened Russian offers him cash to smuggle documents across the Austrian border, and the plot steams into a labyrinth of treachery.

Having entered the last decade of the century, Western Europeans are largely free of old worries about politics. Gone is the era when Spain fretted over the fragility of its democracy, France felt eternally divided and Britain argued about its role in the old empire. Except in Germany, politics are not foremost in people's minds. Instead, they sense a host of economic problems, especially unemployment. This has put West Europeans in a self-centered mood.

As the U.S. Supreme Court considers a new ruling on legal abortion, the issue is flaring in Western Europe, with church-backed groups fighting to limit laws that have made the procedure widely available. The issue has touched off street demonstrations in Italy, threatened the stability of Belgium's government and prompted a debate in West Germany, where authorities have cracked down on violators of the abortion law. But in many other parts of the world, it is barely an issue, either because of a consensus that it is wrong or a broad acceptance of abortion as a form of birth control.

Shortly after he was appointed Belgium's economy minister this spring, Vincent van Quickenborne ordered an inquiry into the price of frites. Invented in Belgium but known to the world as French fries, these crispy national favorites had jumped in price by 4% over the prior year -- despite a 24% drop in the price of potatoes. Suppliers immediately blamed the rocketing cost of energy and rent.

Once upon a time, when rail travelers crossed the Polish-German frontier, their passports and belongings were scrutinized by stern Polish and German border police. Even in the 1990s, it felt like a movie from the 1930s. These days, the Polish police are gone for good, and the Germans are taking a long coffee break. During a recent westbound trip, two German border policemen got on the train at the frontier. They headed straight for the first-class coach and sat down. One read a newspaper; the other plunged into a romantic novel.