By my watch, the takeoff roll for Air France flight 380 lasted 35 seconds. "39 seconds," corrected Laurent Bonnard, a French historian, as we chatted in a lounge area later. Either way, all the planiacs on board Air France's inaugural A380 Airbus flight from New York City to Paris agreed the takeoff was a thing of beauty. Imagine an apartment building with wings that steps into the sky with the quiet grace of a ballet dancer. The lack of ...

A French court on Tuesday convicted the Church of Scientology and six of its members of organized fraud, but stopped short of banning the church.

What was the craziest thing to happen to Britney Spears last week? She went to Target. Twice. She bought a CD. That was it. Sounds pretty boring for an international pop icon, but it's a great relief to those working to keep Britney Inc. in business. For much of 2007 and 2008, Spears was an unhinged superstar unraveling daily in front of a captivated global audience and voracious media scrum. There were hours of ...

The French trader accused of a multi-billion-dollar fraud at banking giant Societe Generale will go on trial next year, a lawyer for the bank said Tuesday. Jerome Kerviel will face charges including forgery, breach of trust, and introducing fraudulent data into the bank's data system, Societe Generale lawyer Jean Veil told CNN. He faces a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to €375,000 euros ($538,000), Veil said. The bank also will ask that ...

Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus. The Hollywood actors are among the top 10 celebrity searches online that can lead to computer problems, according to a report released Tuesday by the computer security company McAfee. The company named Biel the "most dangerous celebrity in cyberspace." One in five Internet searches for terms related to "Jessica Biel" leads to a Web page, photo, video or ...

The following five sites have proven the most consistently useful for the editors of Budget Travel, who do thousands of searches a year. Dohop.com Strictly for booking plane trips entirely outside of the U.S., such as a flight between Paris and Rome. The site runs simultaneous searches of multiple airports serving the same city -- five airports in London, for instance -- and it retrieves fares from no-frills independent carriers like EasyJet and Ryanair, which many better-known travel sites overlook. ...

In 2007 and 2008, photojournalist Tomas Van Houtryve visited North Korea by infiltrating a communist solidarity delegation. In the second story in his three-part TIME.com series, Van Houtryve describes the surveillance he was subjected to and the bizarre majesty of the mausoleum of Kim Il Sung. After dinner at the end of my second day, I was pulled aside by my guides. The interrogation lasted for four hours. The most grim-looking of our minders, Mr. Chung , was bad ...

Back in his days as the geek god of clerks at Manhattan Beach Video Archives, Quentin Tarantino must have looked at all those World War II movies, especially the ones about plots to kill Hitler, and realized what was wrong: everybody knows the ending. Bad guys lose. Hitler died in his bunker. Where's the suspense? Where's the ambiguity? Most films about the war treat the historical record as sacred, which often serves as an excuse for lofty moral judgments. ...

Once lost, virginity can never be replaced — but modern medicine now offers women a near-perfect physical simulation of their lost innocence. Hymenoplasty, the surgical reconstruction of the hymen broken during a women's first experience of intercourse, or, increasingly, during demanding exercise or as a result of a collision or fall by women who've never had sex, has prompted a growing number of young betrothed women in France to make a last-ditch attempt to avoid the humiliation, repudiation, and ...

The first time I went jogging in Tehran, I nearly hyperventilated after four blocks, despite wearing the gauziest of head scarves and a decidedly immodest Nike capris. The fabric covering my ears and neck stoked my body temperature unbearably, and the pleasurable strain of running gave way to acute discomfort. "How am I going to stay fit here?" I wailed to my Iranian girlfriends, experts in the dilemma of balancing exercise with Islamic modesty codes. They offered me a ...