BT Radar: 7 interesting travel items on the Web

Starting Oct. 1, United Airlines will stop serving free meals to coach-class passengers on transatlantic flights between Washington D.C. (Dulles airport) and destinations in Europe. It's the first U.S. airline to stop distributing free meals on transatlantic flights. The airline will offer salads and sandwiches for $9, says The Washington Post. Meals in first and business classes will remain free for transatlantic flights. But for most domestic flights, business class will no longer get free meals. And the price of meals for flights within the U.S. will also rise. (See United's pricing chart for details.) No word yet on whether flight attendants will be able to handle all the cash payments. The game of "does anyone have small bills?" will get very old on a long transatlantic flight. I hope they'll give hand-held, credit-card reading machines to them, like US Airways is giving some of its flight attendants on domestic flights. (Virgin Atlantic has credit-card swipe readers on each seatback.) [The announcement was predicted by the blog Upgrade: Travel Better.] What would you do if your transatlantic flight didn't offer a free meal? Pay for a meal, or pack your own? MORE FROM BT How you can make a first-class sandwich for a coach-class flight

Have an ear for the difference between a Scottish brogue and a Welsh lilt? Can you pick out a Hungarian just by listening to the person speak English? Now you have the chance to prove your aural skills with the Accent Game. This multiple-choice test features videos of 16 real people reciting lines from Rudyard Kipling's "If." It was developed by Language Trainers Group, a Brighton, England-based education company. Earn three points for each country-of-origin you name correctly; plus, snag two bonus points by guessing the hometown of every native English-speaker. Guess 16 to win. So far, the poorest scorers have been American and German, while most difficult accents to peg have been Lithuanian and Hungarian. The game was designed to be a fun diversion rather than an aid to learning. But at the very least, you'll become more familiar with a few Kipling stanzas. If you think you have an interesting accent, you can submit your own video of a reading of William Wordsworth's "Daffodils" or Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" for the site's next version. EARLIER Video: In 3 minutes, this young woman says hello in 21 accents

Bern, Switzerland, is creating a new downtown park for its resident bears. The capital city is expanding its landmark Bear Pit into a one-and-a-half-acre BearPark, which is set to open in October 2009. The new bear terrain will extend from the current enclosures (which have been in the same location since 1857) down to the banks of the Aare River. It will include bear-friendly landscaping, such as two forested areas, three caves, and a large pool in which Pedro and Tana, Bern's two resident Pyrenean brown bears, can swim and play. Visitors will be able to watch the bears, for free, 24 hours a day through clear fences from all four sides of the park. The expanded terrain will allow Pedro and Tana some privacy—but the city promises to provide "technological equipment" to help visitors locate the animals if they become hard to spot. Until the debut of BearPark, Pedro and Tana can be seen in their more modest open-air enclosure every day from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the summer, during which time they accept gifts of bear food that are available for purchase from bear guards. Bern's relationship to bears can be traced back to the city's birth: The city founder, Berchtold V von Zãhringen, is said to have killed a bear on the peninsula where the city now stands. The capital's name comes from Bãr, which is German for bear, and the animal graces the Bern's coat of arms. Video: See a kid feeding one of the bears of Bern: