Word: sweden
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...Friday morning, civil-aviation authorities in Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Finland, Norway and Sweden had closed all or parts of their airspaces. In France, officials shut down 24 airports, including Paris' Charles de Gaulle. In Germany, authorities closed 12 of the country's 16 airports, including Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg. Eurocontrol estimates that roughly half of the 600 transatlantic flights scheduled for Friday have been canceled. (See pictures of the world's most polluted places...
...Even royalty has had to bow to Mother Nature. Several monarchs have been delayed in their efforts to attend a celebration of the 70th birthday of Denmark's Queen Margrethe. Despite RSVPing for the festivities, which began Thursday night, Norway's King Harald, Spain's King Juan Carlos and Sweden's King Carl Gustav have yet to appear in Copenhagen. Elsewhere, Norway's Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, who had been attending President Obama's nuclear summit, is stuck in New York. According to his press secretary, the Premier is "running the Norwegian government from the United States...
...amid the ash, there are a few glints of hope. By Friday afternoon, Sweden was gradually reopening its northern airspace, six planes were permitted to fly into and out of England's Manchester Airport, and a limited number of flights were departing from Northern Ireland and southwest England. As for other modes of transport, Eurostar trains reported a complete sellout of its services to Brussels and Paris for a second day on Friday. Rail and ferry services are also reporting rises in their passenger numbers...
...carry a famous political name, but Papandreou is not cut from the same cloth as most Greek politicians. Trim and fit, the U.S.-born Prime Minister (his mother, Margaret, is from Illinois) lived much of his youth in exile with his father in the U.S., Canada and Sweden. He speaks English with a quiet, Midwestern cadence and perfect American idioms. In Greek he's cerebral rather than fervent, eschewing the widespread idea that a Greek politician needs to dominate a room with oversize rhetoric. The Greek press sometimes even mocks him for his small grammatical errors. (See TIME's Greece...
Papandreou says he wants Greece to become the Sweden of the Mediterranean - powered by green energy and boutique tourism - and says it is possible to have both a generous welfare system and a competitive economy. Despite the bumps of the past few months, he remains optimistic about the European project. "I think Europe is in a transition," he says. "I'd say it's gone from being a peace project to being a ... prototype for a globalized society." He would like to lead the way. But first, there's a crisis to deal with...