Gadling

Travelers in Russia have always had a lot to thank Czech beer companies for, since the makers of some of the world's best beers have long been able to send their foamy wares to the Russian market, giving beer lovers a better alternative to the country's less-than-stellar national brews.

Exports to Russia have always been a large revenue source for the companies that brew the likes of Staropramen and Pilsner Urquell.

But the Russian market could soon dry up for Czech beers.

Russia political analysts say the country should consider banning all Czech beers. The reason? Objections over Czech plans to host a United States radar station, which would be part of a missile defense shield in eastern Europe that Russia thinks is aimed at it, despite U.S. assurances to the contrary.

Russia is considering other, seemingly stronger moves. Days after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Prague to ink the radar deal a few weeks ago, the Czech Republic experienced a mysterious decrease in natural gas supplies from Russian pipelines. Analysts say Russia should also consider re-opening a radar station in Cuba.

But don't underestimate what effect a Czech beer ban could have. It would be a "serious response" to the U.S./Czech radar base, an analyst tells the Russian newspaper Ria Novosti.

No word yet on whether Czechs would consider responding with a ban on Russian vodka.

Back in March, I posted on a news story that CNN broke that reported how the Transportation Security Administration's much-vaunted air marshals were missing on most U.S. flights.

Now, the TSA is on the hunt for whoever leaked that information to the network.

TSA spokesman Christopher White tells CNN that an investigation is looking into the "possible unauthorized release of sensitive and classified information to the news media by covered parties."

Here's my question: If the TSA claims that the CNN report that less than 1 percent of U.S. flights have an air marshals on board is a myth, which it does, then would there exist sensitive and classified information to be leaked in the first place? Seems the TSA's acknowledgment that there exists such information throws some benefit of the doubt to CNN's reporting.

The TSA is busy talking to current and former U.S. air marshals to see if they spoke to the network. In one case, the TSA questioned a former air marshal who had received an e-mail from CNN on his personal e-mail account while he was away on a leave-of-absence serving in Iraq.

It only took five minutes for three commuter jets to collide at Baton Rouge Metro Airport in Louisiana yesterday.

WAFB TV in the Louisiana capital says the incident happened at the airport's new regional maintenance hanger for Atlantic Southwest Airlines.

The three planes were valued at $100 million, and reportedly one was totaled.

It happened when a mechanic hit the starter switch on one of the planes that was meant to get compressor blades to slowly start spinning. Instead, the plane went into full takeoff mode, pivoting wildly throughout the hangar at 90 degree angles before crashing into the other planes.

Witnesses tell the television channel that it was a lucky turnout that only the three planes were damaged. There were 14 ASA maintenance workers in the hangar, and in such a closed space the accident could have resulted in a serious explosion.

Confronted with an exodus of veteran air traffic controllers who are hitting retirement age, the Federal Aviation Administration is busy recruiting -- at, among other places, high schools.

The FAA is busy wooing recent high school grads to come right on board, so to speak, and begin training to be controllers. They'll go through three months of training before becoming "controllers in training." Not long after that, they'll be staff.

The New York Post broke the story today.

The FAA has just completed a recruitment drive that placed ads on Craig's List, Myspace and at high schools nationwide. The feds were offering more than $100,000 in signing bonuses to newbies to draw them to the New York area's five understaffed radar centers, says the Post.

There's a one-time $27,000 bonus at the start of training, with another $75,000 paid out over four years.

So far, the Post says, one recent hire is a 20-year-old man who is currently monitoring radars at a station in Westbury, LI. He happens to have majored in air traffic control, but the FAA says students who have completed the 12th grade are eligible.

This news comes after two recent near-misses above the skies of New York that are being attributed to understaffed radar stations.

On July 5, two passenger jets inbound to JFK came within 100 feet of colliding in mid air, which the FAA considers to be an extremely close call. On June 25, a Learjet was given the green light to land at Teterboro Airport on a runway on which maintenance employees were busy working.

By 2011, nearly 60 percent of all air traffic controllers nationwide will have less than five years experience on the job, the Post says.

I don't know how to feel about this. On the one hand, the FAA has to get new people in there to bring staffing numbers up to a safe level. Then again, how safe do we feel knowing the FAA is searching out applicants for this life-or-death job on Myspace?

Tourism in Denali National Park, home to 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, could get a lot greener before we know it.

If you've been to Denali you know that the park forbids personal cars for the 92-mile length of the park road. Instead, visitors catch a diesel bus near the park entrance. The road is the only way to get into and out of the park.

Park officials are now testing out a hybrid tour bus to eventually replace the fleet of 110 diesel buses that take thousands each year to view North America's highest mountain and the wildlife that surrounds it.

Officials tell the Associated Press that these hybrids reduce the amount carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent, nitrogen oxide emissions by another 20 percent and particulate emissions by 30 percent.

That translates into a much more environmentally friendly vehicle for one of the country's most beautiful...environments.

Officials are also touting the gas efficiency of the hybrids, since diesel fuel in the area is topping out at around $5 a gallon. The hybrid bus requires around 70 percent less fuel as the park's current diesel buses.

The hybrid system combines a diesel engine with an 80-kilowatt powertrain that incorporates a transmission, batteries and an electric motor, the AP reports.

Right now the park is looking to slowly phase out its diesel fleet, and officials tell the AP it could replace anywhere from two to 12 buses each year with the hybrid models.

But this will come with a significant price tag: Each hybrid bus costs $200,000 -- twice as much as the buses currently in use.

These have been a bumpy few days for Northwest Airlines.

First, on Sunday, a Northwest flight from Tampa to Detroit had to make an emergency landing in Dayton, Ohio after a computer for one of the engines malfunctioned, the Associated Press reports.

Then yesterday, a Northwest flight from Minneapolis to Chicago had to make an emergency landing in Madison, Wisconsin, when a gauge failure caused the pilot to think there had been a drop in cabin pressure.

The 115 passengers on board the flight had to be bused to Chicago, a Northwest spokesman told the AP.

In both cases, Northwest Airline officials said no one was injured.

Prague, the destination of choice for many a rowdy, drunken British stag party, is about three weeks into a public drinking ban at most of the major tourist spots in the city center.

The ban is aimed at the general public, not just stag parties, but anybody who knows Prague will tell you they'll be the ones most likely to be stopped by police, along with, perhaps, the winos outside the Národní trida metro stop.

Anyway, some of the most popular sites/gathering spots in the city center around which public boozing is now outlawed, according to a recent article in the Prague Post, include: the National Theater, Národní street, the pedestrian Na Příkopě street, Wenceslas Square, Hradčanské náměstí, Kampa Park and Behind the Old Town Hall on Old Town Square.

Gadling's Iva Skoch can breath a sigh of relief: It seems her beloved Zizkov neighborhood is outside the ban.

The drinking ban joins another ban on littering in the city center, also taking effect this month.

The real question is to what extent Czech police will enforce this, since they are not known to be, well, a real diligent bunch when it comes to enforcing laws like this.

I was in Prague this weekend, and my friend's mocked the law. I also saw plenty of public drinkers, some walking right past police.

"All news out of Africa is bad," says Paul Theroux in the opening of his 2003 book Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, and while it's just the first sentence in a sweeping narrative that encounters misery and hope in equal measure, he has a point.

It is still difficult for Africa to elbow its way into the world's headlines without dragging some kind of disaster story along with it: Famine, AIDS, political violence, civil war.

It is always nice to encounter writing -- book length or journalism -- that finds other things to say about the Greenest Continent, writing that at the very least attempts to go beyond a fatalistic approach to Africa so often driven by major media outfits and pack journalism. Writing, in other words, that searches for, and ultimately finds, some context.

Theroux's book is one example, and the travel books of Jeffrey Tayler are another. The subtle novels of Alexander McCall Smith come to mind.

African narratives in daily journalism are harder to find, put they are out there (one that immediately springs to mind is Boston Globe travel writer Tom Haines' brilliant dispatch from Sudan a few years back).

The work of author and adventurer Jon Bowermaster, a frequent contributor to National Geographic and National Geographic Adventure, is a part of this second group.

Bowermaster is currently writing a series of dispatches as he makes his way along the coast of Northwest Africa.

I like them because they read like vignettes, each one a picture with a few characters at their center: Shopkeepers in Casablanca, fisherman in Dakar. And he's touching on issues that do not usually make it to newspaper front pages: Overfishing in Senegal, the region's desertification, the questionable legacy of Thor Heyerdahl in the Canary Islands.

In many of these dispatches you will hear the voices of Africans, a nice reminder that this troubled continent still has a lot to say.

Give them a read.

A maid at the Hy-Way Motel near Fairfax City, Virginia, got quite a surprise recently when she discovered that several duffel bags that had been left in one of the motel's rooms were full of exotic snakes.

Twelve of the 17 snakes found were venomous; two had died, giving off an odor that attracted the maid's attention.

The Washington Post is reporting that the snakes belong to a man from Arlington County, Virginia, who was known to keep more than 100 exotic snakes in his home, but had been recently ordered by county authorities to remove them by the beginning of the month.

The man had apparently rented the Hy-Way Motel room for an entire week just to store some of his snakes there.

The man was not present when the snakes were discovered.

The lead singer and lead guitarist of U2, Bono and The Edge, won a protracted legal battle yesterday in their effort to renovate and expand Dublin's Clarence hotel, which they own.

The Clarence, located near the Temple Bar district of Dublin, is one of the city's most famous hotels.

The architect that the two musicians have hired for the $235 million renovation plan intends to completely gut the hotel before expanding into neighboring property sites, ultimately more than tripling the number of rooms currently offered.

The duo's plan had been marred in a 4 year legal battle, as preservationists argued that too many other protected buildings in the vicinity would be affected, including several which now will have to be knocked down.

Ireland's planning board approved the Clarence expansion, but with conditions, including calling for an archeologist to be on site throughout the project.

Naturally, preservationists say the celebrity of Bono and The Edge, two of Ireland's richest men, allowed them to bypass planning laws that would have thwarted anyone else.