With prices rising across Europe, people are more intent than ever on finding a cheap holiday destination. German motor club ADAC has helpfully provided a ranking of Europe's summer getaways, organized according to the cost of typical vacation purchases. This year it finds that Poland is the best value.

DPA

Germany's ADAC motor club ranks the country's beaches, like this one in Usedom, as average value. Next door in Poland the vacation prices are lower -- and the sand just as jammed. As the weather warms up, hard-working Europeans start staring out their office windows and dreaming of a nice long summer break. But where to go?

For budget-conscious beachgoers, the prices at classic vacation destinations like Turkey, southern France and the Croatian coast are becoming more and more forbidding. With sunbathing season on the way, Germany's largest motor club has some surprising alternative suggestions.

In a report released on Thursday, the club compared prices in 10 popular European destinations to see which offered the best get-away value. The most expensive country for a beachside vacation was France. The cheapest? Germany's neighbor Poland, followed by Greece, Portugal, Spain and Turkey. Germany came in a respectable sixth, ranked "average" in terms of its vacation value.

The risk of football fans having to forgo their French fries during Euro 2008 has been averted. Only weeks before Europe's biggest soccer tournament kicks off in Switzerland, the government has stepped in to guarantee potato supplies.

 French fries also available in Switzerland throughout Euro 2008. Anyone who has been to a soccer game in Europe knows that fries and burgers are among the most popular food items on sale at football grounds. So, it must have come as a shock when Switzerland's potato industry association warned supplies of the lowly spud were running low -- just weeks before Euro 2008, the continent's biggest soccer tournament, gets underway.

But fans heading to Switzerland for next month's tournament can rest assured they will not have to do without fries. The Swiss government has taken measures to ease the potato shortage. A spokesman for the country's Department of Agriculture told Swiss radio station RadioDRS Wednesday that the government would allow an extra 5,000 tons of potatoes to be imported.

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - A mother and child separated. A father's war wound. An uncle's name on a list.

The unrelated and disparate items are among the discoveries made by 40 Jewish genealogists who spent the past week plumbing a trove of Nazi documents made public after 60 years.

For genealogists of Jewish families, the Holocaust is both a tragedy and a black hole, because so many of the 6 million Jewish victims disappeared without a trace. For years, researchers hoping to fill the gaps have longed to dive into the more than 50 million documents held in this German spa town and entrusted to the International Tracing Service, or ITS.

(...)For decades after World War II, the files were used only to help find missing persons or document atrocities to support compensation claims. But in November, the last of the 11 countries that govern the archive under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross cleared the way for public access.

Since then, interest has skyrocketed. Erich Oetiker, deputy director of the archive, said while the staff of 400 continue to process some 1,000 tracing requests per day, there are now also near daily visits from historians or individuals eager to trace a lost person's fate or view an original document.