The one-way fee to Brussels Airport is set to jump to € 5.07 on February 1, marking a 14% increase from the current supplement of € 4.44, after the decision was officially adopted by the federal government Friday. The increased supplement, which is added to the price of a normal train ticket to...

Last year’s figures show a significant drop in the amount of stolen copper cable along Belgium’s rail system. Reports for 2013 indicate a drop of 40% over the 2012 numbers. Belgian Railways, the Federal Railway Police, and the Belgian rail infrastructure company Infrabel, say that the dramatic...

A new report has revealed the extent that some of Belgium’s wealthiest citizens have gone to avoid paying their taxes. A professor at the London School of Economics has crunched the numbers from the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and has found that Belgians have a cool €60 billion hidden away in Swiss...

The Flemish medical sector is circulating a petition against the plan of federal public health minister Laurette Onkelinx to abolish the limit on the number of new doctors by allowing students to apply for studies in general practice or one of the bottleneck specialist professions without taking an...

Flemish environment minister Joke Schauvliege has reached an agreement with the cinema sector on a new system to control noise levels during the screening of digital films. “The goal is to protect the cinema viewer – and in particular children,” she said. The government of Flanders has already...

What do you do? For about five years I’ve been working as a credit manager at a BMW garage. In concrete terms, that means I follow up on clients who can’t make their payments. Every month I send out a reminder. If they don’t contact me, I call them up the following week. No two work days are the...

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has completed a study to find out how EU member states fare when it comes to weight. The findings show Belgium doing well amongst their EU neighbours, with the average Belgian weighing in at 68.8 kilograms. This puts the country slightly behind the...

The Belgian film The Broken Circle Breakdown has been nominated for an Academy Award in the category Best Foreign Language Film. The nominations were announced in Beverly Hills yesterday afternoon Belgian time. “I just got done crying,” said the film’s director Felix Van Groeningen at a press...

Consumers need to be introduced to more unfamiliar species of fish to help prevent waste, the Flemish Fisheries Association (VVV) said yesterday, when it was revealed that more than 300 tonnes of fresh fish was discarded in 2012 for lack of sales. “People buy the fish they already know, like cod,...

Last year showed a major decline in the number of passports issued to ‘new Belgians.’ As previously reported in the Bulletin, the number of new passports dropped significantly to only 5,000 in 2013, compared to 45,000 the year before. The reduction is directly linked to tougher measures implemented...