By Susan Spano
Los Angeles Times
VENICE, Italy ~ Pianissimo, pianissimo. That’s how morning comes on Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Pigeons dawdle around a trash can. The woman who tends the newsstand gives her dog a bowl of water. Then the grate at the Bar all’Orologio clangs open, a sure sign that another summer day has [...]

BEIJING ~ Beijing hotels that had hoped to cash in on an Olympic boom by hiking rates said this week they were having to slash prices in a last-ditch bid to fill empty rooms.
Occupancy rates for the hotel industry were lower than expected in the run-up to next month’s Games after many hotels more than [...]

Annual Paris Beach Party Kicks Off

PARIS ~ A three-kilometer stretch of the banks of the river Seine turned into a palm-lined sandy beach on Monday for a few weeks as the seventh annual Paris Plage kicked off.
The usually busy roads lining the river in central Paris have been closed to traffic until August 21 and [...]

Half Million Dollars Found in Diapers
MEXICO CITY ~ A package of baby diapers yielded an unlikely load in Mexico, according to the Defense Ministry: nearly half a million dollars in cash.
Soldiers conducting a routine check last Friday “found in a tractor-trailer a packet of diapers containing US$490,300,” the ministry said in a statement.
It said the [...]

If your understanding of Chinese is limited to takeout menus, you need a friend fluent in Mandarin. With a telephone interpreter and translation service, English-speaking visitors to China can get directions, make reservations and basically avoid embarrassment. We tested two interpreter services in the market: chinaONEcall, a British company started in 2006 that promotes itself [...]

By Amy Chavez
For The Bali Times

The other day my husband went out to cut down some bamboo. This bamboo is all around our house and gets so tall it starts hitting the roof tiles and eventually works them loose till they fall off.
Now keep in mind that this is Jakarta Bamboo, so as you can [...]

By The Mark Ulyseas
For The Bali Times
This is my 50th column for The Bali Times. It would have been the 52nd but for Christmas week, when there is a double edition, and the fact that I missed a deadline this year. All in all, it has been one invigorating, vibrating, intensive year that has seen [...]