Five people, including three children, died Saturday when their light plane crashed at Charleroi airport in southern Belgium, forcing its closure for several hours, police said.

The two adults and the children on the Cessna aircraft were from the same family, the police said.

Belgium has launched a new stamp sure to delight chocoholics around the world.

"We have added a chocolate taste to the glue of the stamps... which you can taste when you lick it," the Belgian postal service said.

The U.N.'s climate science panel bemoaned Wednesday a fresh leak of data from a landmark report on global warming that it will start releasing this year.

"Clearly, it is regrettable, all the leaked material is in draft form, internal working documents," Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice president of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told Agence France Presse.

Scientific experts have greenlighted the restart of two Belgian nuclear power plants despite signs of micro-cracks in reactor vessels, the daily Le Soir said Saturday.

No independent confirmation was immediately available from Belgium's nuclear safety authority, AFCN.

Belgium on Wednesday offered to host an office of Syria's opposition National Coalition in Brussels, headquarters of both the European Union and NATO.

Speaking from Morocco where he was attending a meeting of the Friends of Syria group, Foreign Minister Didier Reynders told the national Belga news agency that "I have proposed to the (Syrian) coalition that it organise a representation in Brussels."

Belgium on Friday raised its terror threat level to the second-highest ahead of the release of a new home-made film on the Internet next week criticizing the Prophet Mohammed.

Interior Minister Joelle Milquet said the decision by a terror analysis and coordination unit was "a simple preventative measure," taking the level of threat up from two to three out of a maximum of four.

This time, Belgium's royal family came out swinging.

Crown Prince Philippe, 52, had been depicted in a book as less of a man than is needed to become the next king of Belgium. Again.

Flemish nationalist leader Bart De Wever scored a breakthrough election win Sunday and immediately urged Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo to radically re-shape the federal state.

Hailing a "historic" victory for himself in Antwerp with big gains right across Dutch-speaking Flanders in local polls, De Wever said Di Rupo and his coalition partners should "assume your responsibility."

Tens of thousands of left-wing protesters took to the streets of Paris on Sunday to denounce EU-driven austerity measures being pushed on member states, a day after similar protests in Spain and Portugal.

Chanting "Resistance!" protesters marched through central Paris in a rally organizers said was aimed at fighting EU-imposed austerity, not at criticizing the government of Socialist President Francois Hollande.

The airport security thwarted on Saturday an attempt by a Lebanese passenger to smuggle drugs to Belgium, the National News Agency reported.

The NNA said that the 46-year-old man, who was identified by his initials as A. Z., was trying to smuggle 8 kilograms of heroin.