Get the best travel news here curated by Lonely Planet Destination Editors, who use their expertise to bring you the stories that matter from all over the world. In today’s edition: a tourist leaves a satyr statue legless while taking a ‘selfie’, a Chinese tour agency offers smog insurance, and San Francisco plans to ban e-cigarettes.

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YOUR WORLD TODAY

20 March is…
The start of the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC
Opening day for the Keukenhof Gardens in the Netherlands
Independence Day in Tunisia

EUROPE

Stories curated by Lonely Planet’s Europe Destination Editors: Jo Cooke, James Smart, Brana Vladisavljevic, Kate Morgan, Anna Tyler and Gemma Graham.

RockNess 2011. Image by Ian Oldham / CC BY 2.0

Scottish music festival cancelled
Scotland’s RockNess festival has been cancelled. The 35,000 capacity event is usually held in June on the Shores of Loch Ness and has featured Mumford & Sons, Ellie Goulding and Fatboy Slim. The organisers say they’re taking a break because of the large number of events happening at the time (including the World Cup and Commonwealth Games) and the festival will return in 2015, though some suggest the event, like other UK festivals, has been affected by cheaper foreign rivals. Read
more: scotsman.com

Train collides with bus in Turkey killing nine
Nine people have been reported killed and five injured after a train collided with a minibus in Mersin, Turkey. The train, which was said to be carrying local commuters, hit the bus near a level crossing. Read more: bbc.co.uk

The deadly legacy of WWI in Belgium
Two construction workers have been killed by an unexploded WWI bomb in Ypres, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the conflict. It is estimated that one tonne of TNT was dropped on every square metre of the Western Front, and the Belgian Army still conducts an annual ‘Iron Harvest’ of bombs and shrapnel recovered from fields and building sites. Read more: bbc.co.uk

2014 expected to be a bumper year for tourism in Sarajevo
Despite the year starting with an extremely poor ski season, 2014 is expected to be a record year for tourism in Sarajevo and the rest of Bosnia & Hercegovina, as indicated by an extremely high level of enquiries, both from tourists and journalists. Key factors expected to drive this rise in tourist numbers are new flights to Sarajevo available from low-cost carriers and the 100th anniversary of the start of WW1, which was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Read more: sarajevotimes.com

Student breaks Greek statue in quest for a better ‘selfie’
A foreign student who climbed onto a statue of a ‘Drunken Satyr’ in the Pinacoteca di Brera art gallery in Milan to try to get a better ‘selfie’ got a nasty surprise when the statue’s leg fell off. Fortunately the statue is a 19th century replica of the ancient …read more