Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their Jewish victims and burn them on giant grates. Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done. Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.
French investigators trying to find out why an Air France plane crashed in the Atlantic say they believe it broke up on contact with water, not in the air.
They also found that the plane's speed sensors had been "a factor but not the cause" of the crash.
All 228 people on the plane were killed when it plunged into the ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on 1 June.
Teams looking for the plane's flight data recorders will continue operations for another 10 days.
