French find Saint-Exupery's plane
After six decades of mystery, a French underwater salvage team has discovered the remains of the plane piloted by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 60 years after he disappeared on a wartime reconnaissance mission over southern France.

Saint-Exupery's disappearance was one of the mysteries of the twentieth century, up there with Amelia Earhart's vanishing act. His Little Prince is beloved by many people, and is said to be the third most popular book after the Bible and Marx's Das Kapital. And irony of ironies, Saint-Exupery's Little Prince is commonly mistaken for Machiavellis' Prince. One friend from UP told me the story of one classmate who brought to class Saint-Ex's Little Prince when, in fact, what the professor requested was Machiavelli's Prince. The class had a good laugh.

I know many other people who, once in their lives, mistook one book for the other, but no two books could be so unlike. The Little Prince is a reflection on the meaning of life, a book for dreamers and idealists in short. Machiavelli's Prince, on the other hand, is a book for people who have come to realize the brutish nature of reality. The Little Prince tenders a philosophical resignation; The Prince triggers a rebellious desire to reinvent political order. But it heartens me immensely that in this imperfect world that we live in the two books are often thought as being one and the same.