While there, he reported on many of the decade's major international stories in Eastern Europe, Northern and Western Africa, the Middle East, the Philippines, Japan and the Soviet Union.

CNN: CNN Profiles - Jim Bittermann - Senior European Correspondent

Over the entire region of Northern America and Western Europe, there are more than half a million adolescents of lower secondary school age who are not in education.

UNESCO: MEDIA SERVICES

This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

BBC: The myth of the eight-hour sleep

Sailing along the coast of Siberia by the north-east passage, or Northern Sea Route (NSR), as Russians and mariners call it, cuts the distance between western Europe and east Asia by roughly a third.

ECONOMIST: The melting north | The