Several hundred blonde women marched through the Latvian capital Riga yesterday in a bid to cheer up the crisis-hit Baltic nation, suffering the worst recession of all 27 EU member states.

Led by an orchestra, the first-ever blonde parade featured women dressed in pink and white, some accompanied by lapdogs, in a charity fund-raising event that organisers hope will become an annual event.

"I'm not stupid. I'm beautiful and I'll prove it," Ilona Zigure, a participant, said.

They wanted to clean up the basement but found a treasure trove of photos instead. After Berlin teacher Manfred Beier died, his sons stumbled across 60,000 pictures. Their father, it turns out, created one of the best documentations of life in East Germany, and the first days of the West.

It's amazing how little you can know about your own father: After the death of Berlin resident Manfred Beier in 2002, his sons Wolf and Nils began to sort out their inheritance and came across a treasure. They found dozens of wooden boxes stacked on shelves as well as numerous chests of drawers -- similar to pharmacist cabinets and apparently custom-made. The drawers contained removable inserts, each of which had staggered rows of small drilled holes about three centimeters in diameter. Each of these holes held a roll of miniature film.

Record numbers of Britons who are suffering from terminal illnesses are queueing up for assisted suicide at the controversial Swiss clinic Dignitas, the Observer can reveal.

Almost 800 have taken the first step to taking their lives by becoming members of Dignitas, and 34 men and women, who feel their suffering has become unbearable, are ready to travel to Zurich and take a lethal drug overdose.

The tenfold increase in the number of Britons who have joined Dignitas since 2002 will raise questions about the law that bans assisted suicide in Britain.

Ideas Czech Republic Cheap and cheerful culture Published on May 29 2009  |   România libera

On the set of "Empties" ( Vratné lahve ) a film by Jan Svěrák. Czech Republic, 2007. Print Send React Taille police +   |  Taille police -   

The Czech Republic has one of Europe's lowest culture budgets. Despite this, a new generation of artists that has risen to prominence since the collapse of Communism means that Czech culture continues to be influential at a global level.

When the Czech Republic took over the EU presidency at the beginning of the year, the country's impressive cultural scene, past and present, was vaunted as a major asset - and rightly so. But in the eyes of Czech artists, the reality isn't all that rosy. Not only did the arts go virtually unmentioned in the official speeches given by then-Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek's cabinet members, but as several of the nation's cultural luminaries pointed out, the Czech Republic ranks among the EU countries that spend the least on the arts. Its culture budget, less than 1% of GDP, is below the European average. The Czech Republic has no legislation in place concerning the arts, moreover, and unlike other countries such as France in particular, awards no tax breaks for donations by individuals or private-sector institutions.

Back in the days of Communism, the Czechoslovakian cultural model was the one in which artists had the best chances of surviving censorship. Milan Kundera, one of the most engaging and influential European writers of the past few decades, originally hails from Czechoslovakia. Even among those who stayed put, a number of writers and essayists attained renown, like Vaclav Havel, Ludvík Vaculík and Bohumil Hrabal. Much to Westerners' surprise, though, Milan Kundera is not terribly popular in his native land; and the playwright (and ex-president) Vaclav Havel is not widely read - or performed - any more either.