Sixty years after the Battle of the Bulge reduced it to rubble, the "pearl of the Ardennes" is shining again.
Squeezed between its hilltop medieval fortress and the serpentine River Ourthe, the little town has rediscovered its pre-World War II fame as a thriving tourist center. Its population of 1,400 swells tenfold with summer visitors attracted by the charms of the Ardennes forest. It epitomizes a peaceful, uniting Europe reborn from the ashes of war.
"Tourism has seen an extraordinary boom," says Mayor Jean-Pierre Dardenne. "Hardly a week goes by without the Town Hall getting a request from somebody wanting to open a new bed-and-breakfast."
Sixty years ago, the Ardennes' valleys, trout streams and rolling hills were the scene of Hitler's last gamble.
In December 1944, his panzer divisions smashed through the forests, catching the Allies by surprise and driving the front westward in a "bulge" that ran deep into Belgian territory. It took a month to push the Germans back.
La Roche was seized by the Germans on Dec. 20, then razed by US bombing raids before a pincer action by US and Scottish troops finally liberated the town on Jan. 9. Almost one in 10 of the locals were killed.
"The Americans smashed everything," remembers Jeanne Fourny, 83. "It was necessary of course because they chased out the Germans, but we didn't really enjoy it at the time."
Nowadays, La Roche's location is bringing people back.
"We have space here, which others don't have, where people can just get away to breathe freely for a couple of days," says Dardenne, pointing out that 66 million Europeans live within 320km of La Roche.
Although incomes in the Ardennes are lower than in the rest of Belgium, Dardenne says the region is fast catching up. With tourism replacing farming as the economic mainstay, the population is growing faster than in the rest of the country.
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
FOREST SITE: A rescue helicopter spotted the burning fuselage of the plane in a forested area, with rescue personnel saying they saw no evidence of survivors A passenger plane carrying nearly 50 people crashed yesterday in a remote spot in Russia’s far eastern region of Amur, with no immediate signs of survivors, authorities said. The aircraft, a twin-propeller Antonov-24 operated by Angara Airlines, was headed to the town of Tynda from the city of Blagoveshchensk when it disappeared from radar at about 1pm. A rescue helicopter later spotted the burning fuselage of the plane on a forested mountain slope about 16km from Tynda. Videos published by Russian investigators showed what appeared to be columns of smoke billowing from the wreckage of the plane in a dense, forested area. Rescuers in
‘ARBITRARY’ CASE: Former DR Congo president Joseph Kabila has maintained his innocence and called the country’s courts an instrument of oppression Former Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) president Joseph Kabila went on trial in absentia on Friday on charges including treason over alleged support for Rwanda-backed militants, an AFP reporter at the court said. Kabila, who has lived outside the DR Congo for two years, stands accused at a military court of plotting to overthrow the government of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi — a charge that could yield a death sentence. He also faces charges including homicide, torture and rape linked to the anti-government force M23, the charge sheet said. Other charges include “taking part in an insurrection movement,” “crime against the