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The man known to history as Nostradamus was born in 1503 as Michel de Nostredame. 0:13 The exact circumstances of his birth are unclear, but he is believed to have been born in December 0:19 of that year in the Provence region of southern France, most likely on either the 14th or 0:25 21st in the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. His father was Jaume or Jacques de Nostredame, a notary who worked for the government in 0:35 Provence. Michel’s mother was Reyniére, a granddaughter of Pierre de Saint-Rémy, a prominent physician 0:42 in the town of Saint-Rémy. Jacques and Reyniére had...

Prince William and King Charles exploded into 'torrents of profanity' following comments from Donald Trump about Kate Middleton’s 2012 topless photo scandal, a new book has claimed. After the photographs of the then Duchess of Cambridge sunbathing topless in Provence, France, were published in the French magazine Closer, the business mogul took to Twitter to comment. The former president, 76, tweeted: ‘Kate Middleton is great--but she shouldn’t be sunbathing in the nude--only herself to blame.’ He added: ‘Who wouldn’t take Kate’s picture and make lots of money if she does the nude sunbathing thing. Come on Kate!’ The advance copy...

French amateur archaeologist Bruno Tassan fights to preserve a neglected 2,000-year-old ancient interstate in southern Provence At first glance, it didn't appear that impressive: a worn limestone pillar, six feet high and two feet wide, standing slightly askew beside a country road near the village of Pélissanne in southern France. "A lot of people pass by without knowing what it is," Bruno Tassan, 61, was saying, as he tugged aside dense weeds that had grown over the column since he last inspected it. Tassan was showing me a milliaire, or milestone, one of hundreds planted along the highways of Gaul...

Explanation: Fix your camera to a tripod and you can record graceful trails traced by the stars as planet Earth rotates on its axis. If the tripod is set up at ESO's La Silla Observatory, high in the Atacama desert of Chile, your star trails would look something like this. Spanning about 4 hours on the night of January 24, the image is actually a composite of 250 consecutive 1-minute exposures, looking toward the north. The North Celestial Pole, at the center of the star trail arcs, is just below the horizon in this southern hemisphere perspective. In the foreground,...

A bucolic escape from busier ports of call, Aix-en-Provence in the south of France is known for olive oil, lavender, garlicky foods... and the master painter Paul Cezanne. Cezanne's death 100 years ago will be observed this year with art exhibitions in Washington, D.C., and Provence. Cezanne had a complicated personality. He was considered a "lunatic" by fellow townspeople and was known as a loner. He hated his family, calling them "the nastiest people in the world." They were unsupportive of his artistic career. In Paris, Cezanne found a small circle that understood him: the Impressionists. But his hometown gallery...

American Friends? HardlyBy Gordon LambFrontPageMagazine.com | June 5, 2003 When the first Quakers arrived in America in the late 17th century, they were thought of as heretics, sometimes witches and routinely bizarre. Theirs was a religion based on the ideas the individual is supreme, that the relationship between God and man is a very private affair not to be regulated by government or society, that temperance ("all things in moderation") is a noble way to live one's life. Above all, it prized peace and stated that violence should be avoided if at all possible.The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has mastered...

MAHLBERG, Germany — You could say that Wolfram Siebeck's almost single-handed campaign to transform the way Germans eat began with his discovery that shallots were unavailable in Germany. This was many years ago, in the 1960's. At the time, Mr. Siebeck, who is a sort of German version of Martha Stewart (before Ms. Stewart's legal troubles and without her expansion into a conglomerate), was a culture critic for the weekly Die Zeit and used to attend film festivals in Italy and France. "There I discovered haute cuisine," Mr. Siebeck said, "and I wondered why there is nothing like this in...