Intelligent Travel: Introducing: The Radar

The Radar: IT's Weekly Web Reconnaissance

Welcome to The Radar, Intelligent Travel's newest column. Each week, we try to give you a dazzling display of smart travel tidbits from around the globe, but even we admit we can't manage to make everything fit. So we're highlighting the fascinating finds from our collective Web browsing and bringing them to you, free of charge. We'll be putting them together for each Friday, so if you have your own interesting link to add to our list, please e-mail us, and let us know.

North America

-Ted says bye, in the midst of airline restructuring. Sadly, the airline industry's new norm is: pay more money for fewer choices. [Air travel news]

-Plant Hardiness map tracks climate change in the U.S. [Maps]

-Beyond bricks-and-mortar diplomacy: Washington, D.C.'s diplomatic missions become endangered species. [Global news & trivia]

-One day soon, it may be possible to float from Disneyland to Las Vegas. [Train travel news]

-The New York Times has mapped out a culinary scorecard of American baseball parks. [Maps]

-"Advanced reading is the key to successful tourism," says Arthur Frommer in Canada's Globe and Mail—otherwise you may risk being fined and arrested. Via World Hum. [Global news & trivia]

South America

-Machu Picchu, the lost Incan city in Peru, may have been discovered earlier than previously thought...and ransacked. Some examples of the relics here. [World Heritage site]

-The Andean mountains "jumped" into their current elevation, scientists say. [Global news & trivia]

Catch up with the rest of the world after the jump.

Europe

-Stonehenge, in England, was built as a monument to the dead. [World Heritage site]

-Dolphins behaving like lemmings? Mass suicide suspected in Cornwall, England, beaching. [Environment]

-Copenhagen, Denmark, made the top of Monocle's 2008 list of most livable cities. [Global news & trivia]

-Paris hosts the third annual Shakespeare & Company Literary Festival this weekend, World Hum reports. [Global news & trivia]

Asia

-Guinness awards title to world's largest restaurant in Syria. [Global news & trivia]

-Royal Chitwan National Park, a World Heritage site in Nepal, surveys their rhino population. BBC's website has a neat photo gallery here. [World Heritage site]

-Macau, the casino haven and Special Administrative Region in China, needs croupiers. Also, lessons in Western pop culture. [Global news & trivia]

-Do you have what it takes to be India's next top air hostess? Or rather, it’s more a matter of what you don’t have…such as bad skin, bad teeth, and, more recently, extra baggage. [Air travel news]

-Nice interactive map of the Silk Roads in Asia can be found here, along with interesting stories of crossing them in the 1980s. [Maps]

-Simians in southeast Asia have been observed fishing by the riverside. [Environment]

Africa

-Ethiopia plans to unveil the newly reinstated Axum obelisk in September. [World Heritage site]

-Egypt, Lybia, Algeria, and nine other African nations are living well beyond their ecological means. [Environment]

-FP's Passport reports on the new atlas released by the United Nations Environment Program: "Africa: Atlas of our Changing Environment." [Maps]

-Headless Pyramid rediscovered in Egypt. [Global news & trivia]

Oceania

-Eating a Kit-Kat won't do: more evidence that taking a break, say to New Zealand, is good for your work. [Global news & trivia]

-Humpback comeback in the Pacific Ocean. [Environment]

-By the end of the century the Republic of Kiribati, in the Pacific, will need to have its citizens relocated. [Global news & trivia]