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The search for a commercial jetliner that seemingly vanished without warning between Malaysia and Vietnam continued into the night as dark fell on Asia, officials said. -snip- For instance, after the airline released a manifest, Austria denied that one of its citizens was onboard the flight as the list stated. The Austrian citizen was safe and sound, and his passport had been stolen two years ago, Austrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Weiss told CNN. Similarly, Italy's foreign ministry confirmed that no Italians were onboard MH370, even though an Italian was listed on the manifest. Malaysian officials said they were aware...

An ancient Roman gladiator school has been discovered in Austria, complete with cell blocks, a training arena and a bath complex, archaeologists say. The buried remains of the school — at the site of Carnuntum, near Vienna — were detected not through excavations but through remote-sensing techniques. Based on these findings, researchers reconstructed the gladiator center in virtual 3D models. Archaeologists have been studying Carnuntum, which is on the south bank of the River Danube, for more than 100 years. Previous excavations at the ancient military city had revealed parts of the civilian town, the legionary fortress and an amphitheater....

Maria von Trapp, whose family's story was told in The Sound of Music, has died. She was the last surviving member of the musical family of seven brothers and sisters and passed away in her sleep at home in Vermont at the age of 99 on Tuesday, PEOPLE confirms. Von Trapp, who was the second-eldest daughter, and her family fled their home in Austria to escape from the Nazis in the 1930s and eventually ended up in the U.S., where their story inspired a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical and the popular 1965 movie starring Julie Andrews.

Days after Hitler’s suicide a group of American soldiers, French prisoners, and, yes, German soldiers defended an Austrian castle against an SS division—the only time Germans and Allies fought together in World War II. Andrew Roberts on a story so wild that it has to be made into a movie. The most extraordinary things about Stephen Harding’s The Last Battle, a truly incredible tale of World War II, are that it hasn’t been told before in English, and that it hasn’t already been made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie. Here are the basic facts: on 5 May 1945—five days after...

Welfare spending in Britain has increased faster than almost any other country in Europe since 2000, new figures show. The cost of unemployment benefits, housing support and pensions as share of the economy has increased by more than a quarter over the past thirteen years – growing at a faster rate than in most of the developed world. Spending has gone up from 18.6 per cent of GDP to 23.7 per cent of GDP – an increase of 27 per cent, according to figures from the OECD, the club of most developed nations. By contrast, the average increase in welfare...

Hap DeMarco is 87 years old and feeling it, physically, and facing another surgery in the not so far off future to get his bum ankle fused while worrying about his kid brother, Mickey, his only surviving sibling, whose heart is acting up. There is a lot on his mind, a lot of stuff pressing down, in the present. So answering the phone and finding a reporter on the line hoping to talk about the past, about April 25, 1945, the day his eldest brother, Wilfred — though everybody called him Foxy because he was so smart and handsome —...

The “troika” of international lenders, which sets the terms of eurozone bailouts with little or no democratic oversight, should be replaced by an EU system which is accountable to the European Parliament, MEPs say. “All European instruments that are not based on EU law are provisional. EU instruments should be based on the community method, with the European Parliament acting as democratic legitimator and control body,” Austrian center-right deputy Othmar Karas told press in Strasbourg on Wednesday (15 January). Karas is drafting a report together with a French Socialist colleague, Liem Hoang-Ngoc, on the work of the troika. The name...

(Vienna) in Austria in 2013, there were more than leaving the church than in 2012. Nearly 55,000 Catholics have left the Catholic Church as a corporate body under public law. Thus more Austrians left the Church in the first year of the pontificate of Pope Francis, than in the last year of the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. The church leaders wonder about this phenomenon, which they had not expected. "We would have expected better numbers," said the Bishop of Linz Vicar William Viehböck. Following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. there was relief heard from not a few official...

ANDRIĆGRAD -- Plans for the start of World War I existed 13 months before the Sarajevo assassination and 14 months before Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.The Serbian Kingdom soldiers are seen during the Battle of Kolubara (Wikipedia) This can be inferred from a copy of the letter that Director of the Archives of Serbia Miroslav Perišić presented in Andrićgrad, in the RS, Bosnia. Governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina Oskar Potiorek sent this letter to the then Minister of Austria-Hungary Bilinski on May 28, 1913, and its copy was made public at the history department of Kamengrad (Andrićgrad) on Sunday. Perišić noted that...

MURRIETA (CBSLA.com) — It’s the time of the year when Christmas decorations adorn houses for blocks in communities throughout the Southland. But one entry in the Annual Holiday Home Decorating Contest in Murrieta that features a mythical creature from European folklore has sparked complaints from residents. The house in the 37000 block of Floral Creek Circle features a large handcrafted Krampus, who is sometimes referred to as “evil Santa” or the “Christmas devil” and dates back to pre-Christian Germanic traditions. With a doll on its back and a broomstick in its hand, the clawed black creature is perched on the...

BERLIN - The mayor of the Austrian town of Gföhl said on Tuesday in city council meeting that journalists who reported on asylum seekers should be hanged like the Jews. The Austrian news outlet Heute.at reported on Wednesday that Gföhl’s mayor Karl Simlinger expressed fury about asylum applicants who would be lodged in a planned complex. “I don’t give a shit about asylum seekers, but the journalists are to be blamed. They should be hanged; they are like the Jews.”

AFTER 40 years of hesitation and seven hard years of reform and lobbying, Turkey is basking today in the most qualified of invitations to begin the process of joining Europe - a continent whose eastern half the Ottoman empire controlled for centuries. A European Commission report released yesterday, which paves the way for a deciding vote by the 25-member European Union at its December summit, was heavily qualified, and Turkish leaders were muted in their expressions of delight at their initial success. Presenting the decision to the European parliament last night, commission president Romano Prodi said it was a "qualified...

The second round of talks between Iran and six world powers - Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France and Germany - began Wednesday at the United Nations in Geneva. During the last round of talks three weeks ago, Iran unveiled a general proposal that would limit its nuclear program. Iranian negotiators then said Tehran would be willing to implement the steps as a trust-building measure as the talks toward a permanent solution continued. Last week, teams of nuclear experts from Iran and the world powers met at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to discuss Iran's proposal. Tehran...

German soldiers cross into Belgium in August 1914 Photo: RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts Like one of Field Marshal Haig’s family whiskies, Max Hastings is a dram that steadily improves with age. His own trenchant views on war, and caustic opinions of the commanders who ran them, tended to obtrude too obviously in his early works, suggesting that if only he had been present at key military conferences costly errors would have been avoided. However, Hastings’s recent massive volumes on his specialist subject, the Second World War, have shown why his position as Britain’s leading military historian is now unassailable. They...

Bodies of WWI soldiers found in glacier ROME - The bodies of three Austrian soldiers killed in World War One have been found frozen and almost perfectly preserved in an Italian Alpine glacier. ADVERTISEMENT Mountain rescue worker Maurizio Vicenzi discovered the mummified bodies on Friday, encased upside down in ice at 11,940 feet altitude on San Matteo mountain near the Swiss and Austrian borders. ``Using binoculars, I saw what looked like a stain on the Forni glacier and went to look,'' Vicenzi, 46, from the northern Italian town of Peio told Reuters on Monday. ``When I got close I discovered...

THE BLACK stain on the ice was instantly recognisable. The technician checking a tarpaulin stretched over a section of the Presena Glacier in the Italian Alps—an experimental attempt to slow the melting— quickly called in a rescue party. The block of ice was airlifted to the nearby city of Vicenza. Inside were two soldiers who had fallen at the Battle of Presena in May 1918 and were buried in a crevasse.Their uniforms and their location indicated that they could well have been Kaiserschützen, specialised mountain troops who fought on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to defend these mountains from...

"We've been looking at how we can bring back confidence in the European Union," German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said in Warsaw late on Monday as he arrived for a meeting of ministers in the Future of Europe Group, which he launched in March. The 11-nation group is poised to submit a raft of recommendations to Herman Van Rompuy and Jose Manuel Barroso - heads, respectively, of the bloc's intergovernmental and executive branches, neither of whom are elected by the EU's 500 million people. "We have to understand that we are a community of values and we have to defend...

Several sadomasochists eagerly responded to an advert posted by an Austrian woman farmer seeking clients. But they didn't get the punishment they had hoped for. Instead, they found themselves doing farm labor in fetish gear, while paying for the privilege. To sadomasochists keen on fresh air and the country life, it must have seemed like a dream come true. A 35-year-old woman advertizing herself as a dominatrix promised strict discipline to paying clients on her farm in the northeast of Austria. Some 15 men responded to the advert posted in the Internet, and two or three took up the offer....

The Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire were at war.  Vienna had been under siege for months.  On 11 September a coalition of Christian forces, a Holy League blessed by Bl. Pope Innocent XI, arrived with Jan III Sobieski, King of Poland, to lift the siege.When he saw that the Turks were about to breach the walls of the city, Sobieski attacked earlier than he had intended.On 12 September at 4 am the battle was closed.   Sobieski had called on the protection of Our Lady of Czestochowa before the battle.He sent his forces of 81,000 against the Turks’ 130,000. ...

European banks would leave London “in very short order” if Britain voted to exit the European Union, a senior Goldman Sachs executive said in a newspaper interview published on Monday. Michael Sherwood, a vice-chairman at the bank, said the prospect of a British withdrawal was a real worry given Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans to hold a referendum on the subject if re-elected in 2015. … Goldman’s Sherwood predicted European banks would quickly relocate if Britain did sever its EU ties. “Forget what we would do. Every European firm would be gone in very short order,” he was quoted as...