Irish actor Brendan Gleeson has joined the cast of director Julien Temple’s much-anticipated Marvin Gaye biopic. He will play the late Belgian music promoter Freddy Cousaert, who convinced Gaye to live in Ostend towards the end of his career and encouraged him to put his past drug abuse behind him...

Two Belgian footballers feature in the Premier League Team of the Year, in the shape of Tottenham Hotspur’s Jan Vertonghen and Chelsea’s Eden Hazard. Both players only joined the Premier League last summer and are now featured in an all-star XI alongside the likes of Leighton Baines, Juan Mata,...

When Helen Grant lived in Bad Münstereifel for several years with her family, she fell in love with the local legends and folklore of the historic German spa town and used them to fuel her debut novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden . Her next two equally ghoulish novels, The Glass Demon and...

Chip shop owner Sandy Siebens, 38, from Puurs talks about what she earns and how she spends it. What do you do for a living? I’ve owned a chip shop with my husband for 17 years. We originally took over the chip van where we’d eat every week. It wasn’t very practical though – you’re never home. So...

Police are urging people from a small town in Flanders to return tens of thousands of euros in cash that was thrown out of a speeding car by thieves attempting to make a getaway, the BBC’s Matthew Price reports. The incident occurred in the town of Zedelgem, West Flanders, after the thieves stole a...

Detailed figures are in for admissions for Belgian films in Belgium last year, reports Cineuropa , with the results very different depending on whether the numbers relate to French- or Dutch-language films. On the French side, the balance sheet looked promising with good results recorded by films...

Hundreds of New Zealanders marked Anzac Day on the Western Front at a series of services in Flanders, reports TVNZ . Kiwis attended services in Messines and Zonnebeke’s Polygon Wood to mark the anniversary. The number of New Zealanders and Australians attending such commemorations is expected to...

The recent revamp of our website has proved more successful than we could have hoped for, earning praise for its new design and increased interactivity. To celebrate this, we would like to offer our readers a free small ad in our Classifieds section . 1. To place your free ad, go to our homepage...

Thousands of students took to Leuven’s sun- (and water-) drenched Ladeuzeplein for the second edition of Big Splash on Wednesday. Belgium’s largest water balloon fight pits student clubs against each other in a battle to stay dry. Fifteen teams of 200 took part, armed with an arsenal of 150,000...

Belgian business confidence rebounded in April from a three-and-a-half-year low in the previous month as gains in the manufacturing industry offset deterioration elsewhere in the economy, reports Bloomberg’s Jones Hayden . The confidence index for Belgium rose to -14.7 from -15 in March, the...