Presse écrite
Low income and low status: life’s realities for Roma gypsies
European Voice, 3 June 2004 6
By Simon Coss
KOSICE, Slovakia - Lunik IX is a ghetto. This collection of filthy, crumbling tenement blocks on the wrong side of the ring road around the eastern Slovak city of Kosice is not somewhere anyone would want to live.
Yet Lunik IX, with its overflowing dustbins, broken windows, rubbish- strewn derelict play areas and poorly lit, stinking stairwells is officially home to around 5,000 Roma people.
Radiation fears surround France's old uranium mines
Agence France Presse (AFP), 26 May 2011
By Simon Coss
ROSGLAS, France - It looks like any other leafy woodland path in Brittany, but campaigners say ramblers on this particular trail may face levels of radiation at least 10 times higher than normal. The path runs alongside a disused uranium mine in the hamlet of Rosglas, one of over 200 suspect sites dotted across France, this one marked with just a makeshift sign drawn up by local anti-nuclear campaigners.
Restoring the Beautiful South
European Commission 'Phare Highlights' newsletter, June 2003
By Simon Coss
RAJA, Estonia - An eerie wailing fills the chilly air of the tiny wooden monastery as a small group of black- clad old ladies begin a traditional memorial chant to commemorate the dead. The women are ‘Old Believers’, members of a rapidly dwindling sect of the Christian religion that split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century. The monastery is in Raja, a tiny fishing village in the far south-east of Estonia on the shores of Lake Peipsi, 3555 square kilometres of water that is frozen for much of the year and separates the tiny Baltic State from its mighty Russian neighbour.
Quand l'îlot de Sercq se rêve en grand vignoble
Agence France Presse (AFP), 22 septembre 2010
Par Simon Coss
SERCQ, Iles anglo-normandes - Les frères Barclay, magnats écossais, jumeaux et milliardaires, ont relevé un pari qui peut paraître insensé: produire du vin sur la petite île anglo-normande de Sercq, en comptant... sur le réchauffement climatique.
"Je faisais le tour de l'île quand je me suis dit que c'était possible. On produit bien du bon vin en Angleterre maintenant. Alors pourquoi pas ici?", explique Henry Strachey, ancien marchand d'art depuis longtemps installé sur cet îlot sous contrôle britannique situé à l'est de Guernesey.