A branch of the McDonald’s fast-food restaurant on the Groenplaats square in central Antwerp was evacuated after passers-by noticed a strong smell of gas and alerted the fire service. The smell was coming from the basement of the McDonald’s building. The restaurant and upper floors, as well as two...

With 50 million coffee cups in use and more than three million kitchen knives sold, the success of Piet Stockmans and Vincent Jalet’s line of products for Tupperware shows how much Belgian design has boomed over the last couple of years. The new exhibition The Power of Object(s) focuses on both the...

The largest terrorism trial ever to take place in Belgium started on Monday in Antwerp amid heightened security. The 46 defendants are all charged with membership of a terrorist group, Sharia4Belgium, which recruited volunteers to go to Syria to fight for anti-government Islamist rebels. Among the...

Belgium is one of the largest consumers in the world, using up natural resources at an alarming and unsustainable rate. That’s according to the 10th two-yearly Living Planet Report from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), in which Belgium rose one place to the fifth largest ecological footprint...

Talks on forming a federal coalition government, led by formateurs Kris Peeters of Flemish party CD&V and Charles Michel of the French-speaking party MR, are nearly done. In an interview with VRT news, Michel ( pictured ) said that the negotiators had entered the “home stretch”. Meetings were...

Lighting up a cigarette in the car should be banned, according to 67% of Belgians who responded to a survey by the Foundation Against Cancer. "The support is there, but there is nothing happening at the political level," says Luk Joossens of the Foundation Against Cancer. The Foundation Against...

Pear sales in Belgium have increased by about 30% compared to the same period last year, report De Tijd and Het Nieuwsblad . The sale of apples, by contrast, remains stable. "We have sold roughly 30% more pears in Belgium compared to last year," confirms Etienne Leclère, commercial director of the...

We asked Karel Danau, 31, from Lede how he spends his €2,000 net per month. What do you for a living? We manage the metro and tram high and low voltage grids and co-ordinate technical interventions. When there are problems on the grid, we send people to fix them. The best part is the variety; you...

Thirty years after the scandal in the old Tamar Catholic hospital in Lommel, Limburg province, a group of Belgian bishops are willing to help the mothers who gave birth there. A special ward was set up at Tamar in the 1970s where pregnant women, usually dealing with an unwanted pregnancy out of...

Six Belgian F16 fighter planes took off from Belgium last Friday to join the international military coalition tackling the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group. A parliamentary vote was needed as the country is currently without a federal government. But the F16s took off for the Middle East before...