Are you looking for employment? Do you like to do jigsaw puzzles? No, I mean do you REALLY like to do jigsaw puzzles, like REALLY, REALLY? For instance, do you have just incredible patience, to keep trying to plow ahead even as the task seems gigantic? Oh, and perhaps a sense of pleasure in setting injustice right could help here, too.

Finally, can you read German? Then maybe Germany’s federal government has a job for you! Die Zeit now has a piece about it, called Those who glue together the Stasi files. The former East German State Secret Police (formally the “Ministry for State Security”) got really busy with their shredding-machines in October and November of 1989 as it became increasingly obvious that the regime was tottering and probably about to fall. They had a just incredible amount of incriminating documentation to worry about, miles & miles of files & files (the vast majority in traditional paper). After all, the former East Germany might have set some sort of record for percent of the population informing for the government – spouse spying on spouse was hardly unheard-of – and the Stasi were interested in almost everything.

Unfortunately, those shredders were given the time and lack of interruption to do a pretty good job, resulting in 16,000 sacks of . . . confetti, basically, the shredding machines’ output, each sack containing 50,000 to 80,000 little bits of document.

Nevertheless, the re-unified German government wants to recover as many of those as it can, and has already had people at work since 1995 trying to piece them together. Soon – thank Heavens! – they will be assisted by computer software developed by Germany’s renowned Fraunhofer Research Institute, designed first to scan all the little pieces electronically and then to use automatic algorithms to fit them together.

Until then – and, surely, afterwards as well – there will be a continuing need for human application. This Die Zeit piece is really not any sort of article but a brief photo-series. Yes, the first few are of some unexciting paper-shreds, but then there follow a couple shots showing the puzzle-workers on the job, contemplating the pieces before them, with yet more available in a seemingly-endless procession of sacks. They look stoic; what could be going through their heads? Anything more interesting than a yearning for that next cigarette/chocolate break?

The Dear Leader is dead (and was buried today, in a “private,” no-outsiders Pyongyang mega-ceremony)! Long live the Great Successor! And after he returns from the mausoleum, just look at what news will be on top of his desk!

Atomrakete – yes! “Atom-rocket”! One that will be in North Korean hands, and thus under the “Great Successor’s” personal control, and rather soon! (more…)

It’s the make-or-break EU summit, going on now within the cavernous Justus Lipsius European Council building in the Brussels European Quarter. Will what issues from this conference be enough to save the euro?

The answer to that remains up in the air, as the summit continues into the weekend. What we do already know, however, is that an important split has occurred within the EU, resulting from the failure of German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy to have accepted by all 27 member-states their proposals for greater national budget control and coordination. Now the action on that front has shifted to the group of 17 member-states who actually use the euro.

The excellent “Charlemagne” commentator from the Economist has already termed this development Europe’s great divorce, in an article (in English, of course) featuring at its head a picture of the defiant-looking British PM David Cameron pointing an aggressive finger towards the camera. And indeed, this one and many other press reports from the summit would have their readers believe that the UK is isolated in its stand of resistance against those “Merkozy” proposals for greater EU power over national budgets. That is certainly also the message from the authoritative German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, where an analytical piece from Michael König is rather dramatically entitled Bulldog Cameron bites the British into isolation.

But such observers should be careful about rushing into any over-hasty conclusions. They should remember that a number of other member-states share an attitude towards the EU rather closer to that of the UK than Germany or France. The Czech Republic, for instance:

(more…)

So now the latest trick Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has up his sleeve is to quibble with the Arab League about terms & conditions for the the 500-person monitoring team they want to send there? He needs to start paying attention to that rumbling sound coming from his borders:

This links to an article from the authoritative German national daily Die Welt about how Syria’s neighbor Turkey – whose Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once termed al-Assad his “brother” – is beginning plans to make its own intervention into the Syrian national uprising go beyond mere words. First of all, it’s starting to prepare to impose its own no-fly-zone on the country. Also, according to the authoritative English-language Beirut newspaper The Daily Star, Turkey wants to seize a strip of Syrian land along the common border as a “security zone.”

Don’t get too excited here about the Turks’ zeal to help out their neighbors, though: the main function of such a zone would be as a place for Syrian refugees to be able to stay for a while in safety from their government, rather than have to cross over into Turkey proper. To the south, Jordan is said to be considering this sort of a move too, and both countries are gaining support for it among Western and other Arab countries as al-Assad continues to be intransigent.

By the way, there is an important US airbase in Turkey, at Incirlik, maybe 120km from the Syrian border. The Welt article also mentions US support of Jordanian armed forces, which might get the Americans involved here that way.

Of course, some representatives of the Syrian rebels – in particular the Muslim Brotherhood there – have already called for full-scale military intervention. Turkish, that is; most still will not accept any such explicit help from Western powers. Still, for all the Turkish sabre-rattling, there are also important questions to give its leaders pause. A no-fly-zone – and even just trying to seize enough Syrian territory for the “security zone” – would require disabling Syria’s air force, built around 100 advanced MiG-29 fighters – is the Turkish air force up to the job by itself? Foreign Minister Davutoglu has also made recent statements that Turkey would really rather not go it alone when it comes to any intervention. It would surely require explicit Arab League and UN Security Council approval for any such step, as well as probably co-belligerents (and Jordan alone would likely not be sufficient).

Then again, Syria also currently depends on Turkey for much of its electricity, and for the water coming over the border from Turkish highlands in the form of the Euphrates river. What’s more, the recent attack by a Damascus mob on the Turkish embassy there – complete with burning Turkish flags – was itself not very “brotherly.”

Many of you reading this blog must surely also subscribe to, or at least read regularly, Paul Krugman’s NYT blog The Conscience of a Liberal. It admittedly blows this blog away in influence terms, as it is currently ranked #41 on the Technorati list. But is the Nobel prize-winning Princeton economist as ready to bring forward the often piquant opinions resulting from his economic analyses away from home, so to speak, i.e. when on some forum than his own blog?

Of course he is! Lately what has been dominating the economic front has been the Eurozone, especially Greece and Italy. Even when interviewed by a leading German newspaper, Krugman does not hold back, as we can see in the extended interview published on-line by Die Zeit last Friday: “The euro will mutate into an extended Deutschmark”. (more…)

Greece prime minister Papandreou announces a referendum over the anti-bankruptcy aid package for his country announced at last week’s EU summit – and all hell breaks loose on world markets!

Yes, every other newspaper is writing about this as well, but this particular Die Welt article, by D. Eckert and H. Zschäpitz, stands out for its headline: Papandreou risks a global financial meltdown, or rather the alarm such a headline evokes in contrast to the serious, mainstream sort of paper we all know Die Welt to be – i.e one that doesn’t usually resort to such headlines. Yes, there are no doubt similar-sounding titles in tabloid papers, and not just in Germany, but all that is mere dog-bites-man.

This piece also stands out for the handy list it provides – you have to scroll down a little, look for Die größten Wertverluste . . . – of the banks which have lost the most market-capitalization, so far, from the plummeting prices of their shares. FYI, BNP Paribas stands at the top, with nearly €4.7 billion lost, followed by Deutsche Bank. (It also stands out for author “H. Zschäpitz”: isn’t that just a howler of a name? But no doubt the fellow has a Google Alert on it and will be reading this blogpost sooner or later – my apologies!)

Otherwise, though, I stand vulnerable to the charge of European tokenism. Because the piece that has really clarified things for me is in English, and written by our old friend Dana Blankenhorn. Greek Latest is Solar Scam is its title, it does spend a few paragraphs dissecting the faulty economics behind a Greek solar-energy investment plan. But then it addresses what Papandreou and the Greek authorities are really trying to do with this referendum. Given that Blankenhorn assumes that the result will be “No,” it’s simple: they are threatening to take the rest of Europe to down with them, unless they get an even-better debt-relief deal than the 50% they got from the EU last week.

You should check it out, and the article from Seeking Alpha that Blankenhorn links to as well. Strangely, his link to it reads “Sink the euro” even though that other article itself argues that there is still a chance for a “Yes” vote!

In the midst of all these crises, how about a little good news – apart from Muammar Qaddafi’s death, I mean, which now seems to have been nasty enough to give serious pause.

Holger Dambeck writing in Germany’s Der Spiegel supplies the glad tidings: Mathematicians put together mega-puzzle full of holes. It has to do with a large Renaissance fresco painted back in the 15th century, the time of Leonardo, on a church-wall in Padua, Italy by the noted artist Andrea Mantegna. This particular church was even put on a list, communicated to the Americans in the middle of the Italian campaign in World War II, of places containing artistic treasures that they should try not to damage. Unfortunately, German troops did camp in the area – perhaps counting on being shielded from attack by being so close to a church – and sure enough, they were subject to air-attack and the fresco was destroyed.

That news that this priceless large (almost 1000 square-meters) fresco was dashed in thousands of tiny pieces is not the good news. Into around 88,000 piece, to be more precise – and we know that number because the authorities after the attack did try to gather up all the pieces they could find.

Now many of them are being put back together again to form part of the old fresco! This has been made possible, firstly, by those authorities’ act of collecting all those pieces and storing them in Rome, where in 1992 they were cleaned, photographed, and catalogued insofar as possible. Then all that was needed was some sort of device to figure out how they fit together, and that’s what a team from the Technische Universität at Munich around mathematician Massimo Fornasier provided: software to do that.

On the one hand, this is hardly the first time computers have been brought to bear to a task of this kind – author Dambeck reminds us that German experts came up with software which aided in reconstructing documents which the old East German Stasi had shredded at the time of the fall of the Wall. But on the other, this is only a partial triumph at best, since only less than 10% of the fresco has been recovered as only that many pieces were available. The photo at the top of the article gives you some idea of what they were able to get back. And the project even has its own website – but it’s written in Italian!

Oh, check out this lede, from the German newsmagazine Focus:

Trash, excrement, corpses: pollution on Mount Everest is reaching dramatic proportions. Environmentalists are now demanding installation of toilets.

Is no place now safe from humankind’s depredations? Apparently even the top of the world’s highest mountain is now so frequented that it looks like some penthouse-lounge where no one particularly feels the obligation to pick up after themselves. (Oh, and corpses: that plus corpses.)

According to Focus, the organization currently bringing this dire situation to light is called “Eco Himal,” and their spokesman is the splendidly-named Phinjo Sherpa. These folks have been doing their best to try to clean up the mountaintop since 2008, already hauling away 13 tons of trash, 400 kg of frozen feces and – yes – 4 bodies.

But they claim they can’t handle it by themselves anymore – and they’re not bluffing. They refuse to butte out of the matter until proper sanitary facilities are installed up there

And yes, there at the top of the article you also have a magnificent panorama of a portion of the very same mountain. I squinted and looked hard: couldn’t make out any corpses. Can you?

For all who care to take the time to think on the matter, the recent attack on two Americans in Yemen – alleged Al-Qaeda operatives killed by an unmanned “drone” aircraft, with no trial or other sort of due process – is a rather disturbing new precedent. Among other issues (like the sheer principle of the act, or rather the sheer civil liberty principles it violated), there’s the question of what happens when other nations have a similar military capability and want to use it in the same way, i.e. to kill on foreign soil persons they perceive as dangerous. That is even the subject of an article in today’s (Sunday) New York Times: Coming Soon: The Drone Arms Race. (Killer quote therein: “Is this the world we want to live in? Because we’re creating it.”)

And then there is this tweet from the German newsmagazine Stern:

Seemingly little relief there: that first sentence after all translates as “Out-of-control death machines?” But the larger point is that US drone aircraft have now fallen prey to the same modern vexation that afflicts so many of us: computer viruses. (more…)

So the European Union has finally hit Bashar al-Assad’s Syria regime where it hurts, with an embargo on the oil that country sells. But the Berliner Morgenpost warns us not to get too carried away:

You see, these sanctions take effect only on November 15! Yes, no new contracts for oil delivery can be concluded effective immediately, but the old ones must be adhered to until then.

The villain here is Italy, which demanded this delay citing “a technical requirement.” Meanwhile, Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja had it right with his observation: “If we really mean it, we should act immediately.” Sure, in the same announcement the EU added 54 further members of the Al-Assad regime’s inner circle to the “no-travel” and “assets frozen” lists. But the embargo is the truly meaningful blow to Assad, and there are Syrian protesters still being killed daily – at least 17 yesterday, according to opposition reports. How long can they hold out? How long can those many thousands continue to take to the streets, knowing they are likely to encounter gunfire from the authorities, as their national economy collapses around them?

As I write this, former Libyan dictator Qaddafi is still at large somewhere, although hopefully we’ve agreed that it is not likely to be in Tunisia. Ah, but what of that other direct neighbor to the west, Algeria? His wife and younger sons, and their families, have apparently fled there – can Muammar be far behind?

In fact, things have gone even further than that. Algeria has closed (or at least declared closed – with the obvious exceptions) its 1,000km-long desert border with Libya, has cut diplomatic relations, and of course shows no inclination to formally recognize the new regime there. It is hardly the only country to have bet the wrong way on the ultimate outcome of Qaddafi’s struggle with domestic rebels, but it might be the only one further doubling-down on that failed wager. Why? Several answers are offered in an excellent – though anonymous – analysis in Die Zeit (Algeria’s problem with the new Libya). (more…)

Didja hear the one about the sentinel at his Bab-al-Aziziyah estate in Tripoli?

Yes, there’s much to laugh about concerning Muammar Qaddafi, especially now that the former Libyan dictator has been reduced to scurrying through underground tunnels, occasionally finding the time and microphone to record more “Zenga Zenga”-type rants for broadcast on whatever medium will still have him. (Listening to one of those being rebroadcast today on the Flemish radio news, I swear I also heard chickens clucking in the background – anyone else encounter this?) Hans-Christian Rößler of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung pitches in with a combination comedy-sketch/political obituary entitled Dictator and figure of fun. (more…)

With everything else going on in the world, particularly in the financial realm, the ongoing situation in Libya might have escaped your notice. There’s good news there, though: the tide seems to have turned. It’s no longer a matter of stalemate between the National Transitional Council’s forces and those still loyal to Muamman Qaddafi, but rather of a steady advance by the former on Qaddafi’s capital of Tripoli, and elsewhere. The German newsmagazine Focus (Gaddafi just about to jump) is among those publications bringing us these good tidings, including a quote from one of US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s recent speeches, “I think we can agree that Gaddafi’s days are numbered.” (You say “Gaddafi,” I say “Qaddafi.”)

My problem, though, is with something in their lede: “He is said to have concrete plans for an escape to Tunisia.”

Think about it just a little: what sort of sense does that make? Tunisia – the next door country! And one that had it’s own successful revolution, during which the revolutionaries on more than one occasion expressed their frustration that they were fighting not only against the ruling regime, but also against its supporter and bankroller over the border in Tripoli!

No, although it does seem that Qaddafi is destined sooner or later for that classic “dustbin of history,” the alleged imminent flight to Tunisia does not add up. What’s more, your favorite Middle East expert and mine, Prof. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, has this post just out laying out in detail just how ridiculous the whole Tunisia idea is, and further speculating that what that really is, is something “from US intelligence for psy-ops purposes,” i.e. a fake story whose real purpose is to try to draw further defections from Qaddafi’s inner circle.

Now, it was NBC that was the recipient of this “scoop” originally, and indeed the Focus article does give credit – but then repeats that report. I can understand a US television network passing on questionable information from American intelligence sources hook, line & sinker, but what is the problem with Focus? What happened to those days past when anything coming to Germany from the intelligence services of the “American imperialists” was automatically suspect?

This is the first EuroSavant post I can recall that is in the nature of a travel advisory. The Berlin newspaper taz reports today (Switzers rip off air-guests) on a particular nasty racket that the Swiss authorities are running out of Zürich airport.

It affects non-EU nationals who have the right to visa-free travel within the EU’s common border control-free “Schengen” area – e.g. from the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Japan, as well as the states making up the former Yugoslavia. Ordinarily such citizens can stay within the Schengen area for 90 days, except that many Schengen states (such as even German and France) actually allow a longer stay, still without any visa.

The authorities at Zürich airport will have none of that, though: they have taken to imposing hefty fines on such non-EU nationals trying to fly back home after stays in the Schengen area that exceeded 90 days. The taz piece highlights the story of a 61 year-old American writer who was fined 9,000 Swiss francs (~€8,100) for trying to leave after having “overstayed” within Schengen for eight (8) days. But apparently this sort of thing has happened to 3,116 people in 2009, to 3,504 in 2010, resulting in 1.7 million Swiss francs in fines that latter year. (Switzerland entered the Schengen area only in December 2008.) The cruel thing about this is that those Zürich authorities demand the money just before the victim’s long-distance flight back home – if you offer any resistance or argument, you’ll miss your flight!

Reactions? The official in charge of this policy, one Hanspeter Frei, makes comments to the taz reflecting a seeming profound satisfaction with how things are. On the other hand, the Swiss Office for Non-EU Visitors can only recommend that people not use Zürich to fly out of. And the director of the National Tourist Office is quite disturbed by the whole thing.

Here’s a bit of bald Twitter self-promotion for you:

Turns out that the interview in question is of UC Berkeley Prof. Barry Eichengreen himself, conducted by Die Welt writer Tobias Kaiser. (That link in his tweet opens a PDF of the interview. Of course it is in German, but no need for Google Translate when you’ve got the EuroSavant!)

Well, who among us who publishes on the Net can ever be immune from such cross-posting temptation? Besides, he has some interesting things to say on the current transatlantic debt crises, and his piece was even retweeted, and so implicitly endorsed, by Doctor Doom himself.

Prof. Eichengreen emphasizes that, whatever else might be going on currently in the Eurozone, Italy and Spain must now be the focus of policy-makers’ attention. That is not so insightful per se – German Chancellor Angela Merkel is in Paris today to meet with President Sarkozy and presumably the public finances of those two ailing Mediterranean states will be high on their agenda. (Not that top-level officials from either will be present; that’s not always necessary when the EU’s two big powerhouse-states are having discussions.) (more…)

Here is the judgment on the US debt-ceiling deal from Germany’s authoritative Die Zeit:

That is, chalk up a loss for Obama as president, but a win for him as 2012 presidential candidate.

Why the defeat? Because “the compromise bore the signature of the Tea Party,” even as many among their Congressional representation voted against it out of a conviction that it did not cut spending enough. Still, in view of their intransigence this was the best that the responsible parties in the affair – the president, his Democratic Party, even a few moderate Republicans as might be left – could achieve to avoid the catastrophe of a debt default. (It’s unfortunate that the Die Zeit writer – as usual, unnamed here – either overlooked or just did not mention the 14th Amendment option, which would have defused the whole problem and prevented any future recurrence.)

But: “Whereas the President gave in, the polarized political climate creates new chances for presidential candidate Obama for 2012.” He has firmly captured the decisive middle-ground of American politics, including by the way he showed himself willing to defy his own party to get this compromise done, all of which should gain him votes even from moderate conservatives at the next election. And seizing that middle-ground also put him on top in the Gerechtigkeitsfrage, i.e. the justice/fairness question. The proper way to resolve America’s budget difficulties is both spending cuts and higher taxes, especially on the rich. Polls show voters overwhelmingly are of this opinion. Congress, apparently, is not, but Obama now has the opening to campaign in 2012 even as a sort of opposition politician to gain future opportunities to force this vision through.

Michael Schlieben, of the esteemed German commentary-newspaper Die Zeit, can’t take it anymore: Stop the Breivik Soap Opera!

Mass-murderer as Superstar: Many in the German media are exploiting the private life of the Oslo-gunman – and thereby making him an icon.

To tell the truth, I’m also getting rather tired of hearing about this guy as well – speaking of course in the context of my own media circles, which include the German only to the extent of my daily trawl through all European media.

I actually wasn’t aware of the lengths to which some outlets there have gone in pursuit of this story. Yes, there’s been some questionable stuff from the Bild Zeitung – oooh, if you click there today you get to see the actual explosion-site of his Oslo car-bomb, with hole-in-concrete and debris all around! And Schlieben says that from the Bild readers have also been able to learn of Breivik’s acne when younger, his continual troubles finding a girlfriend, and even the herpes of his step-father(!). A surfeit of information there, we can all agree – but then that’s the Bild, which for decades has carried on News of the World-type reporting for the German reading public.

No, more disturbing is other papers getting into the act which one would think would know better. This blog and Twitter-feed often invokes Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel, but that publication has seen fit to reproduce all the photos off of Breivik’s Facebook profile. And we all know Der Spiegel, which has displayed on its pages photographs of the mass-murderer in an array of uniforms. Other publications (unnamed) have gone into his tax returns, or plumbed his musical tastes, perhaps from his on-line playlists.

Now, it’s not like this guy should be ignored, and over in the US an interesting debate has touched off about the alleged affinity between his “manifesto” and the extreme views of some evangelicals. Still, the sort of mass-voyeurism that Schlieben describes is all that a mass-killer with an ideological agenda could ever want. Yes: “the terrorist has won.”

Amy Winehouse is gone; she was put in the earth yesterday. Who is to blame?

Sophie Albers of Germany’s #2 newsmagazine Stern puts the music industry itself on trial. Her treatment is brief, necessarily, and therefore hardly dispositive, and it’s also rather quirky. Standing for the prosecution: Siouxsie Sioux, of Banshees fame, who is quoted right at the beginning saying “I love music, but I hate the business.” Albers also reports her prophetically remarking a full four years ago about Winehouse that “[t]here are many talented people for whom you know that they will be sucked in and then after one or two albums spit out again.”

In the other corner, appearing for the defense, Albers brings forward a pair of music industry insiders, who mostly try to deflect any blame. Says one: “Amy Winehouse hasn’t made a record in five years. So pressure from the industry cannot have been so insanely high.” Rather, he maintains the pressure goes the other way: rock stars expect to play to packed houses, to have their tours, press appearances, and the rest all arranged and that is all the job of the record company.

Still, these industry executives do concede that the grind of going on tour, making all these appearances, and of simply being continually creative enough to come up with new material to keep the entire parade going is hard on the stars, and is hardly as glamorous a life as it may seem from the outside. But if they want help for the alcohol and drug problems that often result, they first have to realize that they are in trouble and start accepting it, something that Winehouse never did.

This all strikes me as very inconclusive – and likely out-of-date as well, since new recording and distribution technologies are starting to take record companies out of the equation in any event. But there’s been a celebrity death – so there has to be an inquest, the fans demand it.

As turmoil continues to grip European financial markets at the prospect of a sovereign default by Spain or even Italy, the emergency Euro-summit scheduled for Thursday this week is looming large in importance. This is all the more true in view of the fact that European Council President had tried to get everyone together for a summit last Friday – but no one was interested then, even as market rates on Italian debt skyrocketed.

The key figure at the summit, as always, will be German Chancellor Angela Merkel, fresh and possibly even slightly sun-tanned off an official visit to various African countries. Just as she is preparing for Thursday’s meeting, however, scattered press speculation has arisen to the effect that Helmut Kohl – the German Reunification Chancellor, and probably the mentor who did most to make Merkel what she is today – now cannot hold himself back from criticizing her Eurodebt policy. Die macht mir mein Europa kaputt! is the catchy quote from Kohl – “She’s destroying my Europe!” – and it comes from a fairly reputable source, namely the German news-magazine Der Spiegel. Ed Harrison over at Credit Writedowns identifies this Spiegel article and provides his own translation. (more…)

A new drugstore recently opened up in New York City, and the Financial Times Deutschland’s correspondent there, Thorsten Schröder, was there to cover it. Sound strange? Well, this is no ordinary drugstore – this is truly a Wall Street drugstore in the “Too Big to Fail” tradition. Titling his piece (in English) Bankster’s Paradise – Schröder has evidently been in the States long enough to be down with his Coolio references – he leads:

The lunch-break is saved: A pretentious drugstore opens on Wall Street, where they know what brokers need and love – sushi, money and stock-quotes.

Opening day there featured the autograph-signing presence of no less than Darryl Strawberry (trust me: a gigantic NYC baseball celebrity), but it’s the unique amenities that are sure to keep the Financial District worker-bees devoting their lunch-hours here.

In fact, the traders and bankers can find in this Wall Street drugstore almost everything they need in their lives. He who has spent the morning pulling his hair out over falling prices can get it repaired at noon under chandeliers at the hairdresser’s there. Or he can sit on a wooden throne to get his leather shoes shined. There’s an internal manicure-salon, a skin-analysis center and an apothecary’s.

That’s not to mention the sushi bar, with NYSE stock-quotes displayed on an electronic ticker-screen behind it, nor the vaulted ceilings, marble floors, and even golden escalators (yes: güldene Rolltreppen) that mark the place’s layout.

Appropriately enough, this latest affiliate of the Duane Reade drugstore chain is housed in the Trump building and occupies the space formerly taken up by a branch of the Bank of Manhattan. The firm’s management is explicitly experimenting with this new wrinkle of a retail concept as a way to try to make up for the losses it suffered from its prior “Superstore” – not that that was a mistaken business approach, that store just happened to be located in one of the World Trade Center buildings in September, 2011.

As Saturday 9 July 2011 dawns around the world, a new entity takes its place within the family of nations: South Sudan. But is this really any cause for celebration? Or is the feeling on hearing the news more like the one evoked when a welfare mother gives birth to another child: “OK, it exists now, bless its soul – but who is supposed to support it?”

In any event, the new government needs to get to work and come up with a better name than “South Sudan”! How about just stealing “Sudan” for themselves and letting their former northern compatriots come up with a new one instead? There would be plenty of justification: the reason that such a split was necessary in the first place is the significant cultural differences between the Arab North and Black South of the country – and “Sudan” is derived from the Arabic for “black”!

Any state has got to have its head-of-government, and an article by Thomas Scheen in the FAZ introduces us to the first president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, complete with a thumbs-up picture of him up top, resplendent in black suit, black tie, black beard, and black stetson hat – from which he apparently is rarely parted. Little is known about him personally, and he’s loathe to grant interviews; he’s said to be around 60 years old, and his family lives in Nairobi, Kenya for safety reasons. That’s logical, for Kiir has been fighting all his life for South Sudanese independence, starting with the so-called Anyanya Revolt of the late 1960s/early 1970s through a second Sudanese civil war that started in 1983 and is really only ending now – if it is ending – with independence.

Indeed, that’s why Kiir is now president: nobody ever elected him, rather, he co-founded the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) along with the more-charismatic John Garang (later killed in a helicopter crash) and remains its top general. As Scheen points out, “Kiir is ultimately a soldier in the first place, and so far the South Sudan cabinet has shown more similarity to a military council than a democratic government.” Will democracy ever take root in that part of East Africa? For now, at least, South Sudan has many other things to worry about instead.

Pyeongchang! Congratulations!

Er – Gesundheit! What’s that you say? Why that’s Pyeongchang, not a city at all strictly-speaking, but a county, located in the east part of South Korea, and the locale which was chosen yesterday to be the host of the 2018 Winter Olympics. Maybe/probably you don’t know it now; you’ll know the name enough by, say, March of 2018.

With their victory, the South Koreans left behind in their dust their other two main competitors for this designation, namely Munich/Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany, of course) and Annecy (in the French Alps, right by the Swiss border). But don’t labor under any mistaken impression that Pyeongchang ran away with the competition based on any super-spectacular presentation they made earlier this week before the International Olympic Committee’s conclave in Durban, South Africa. No no no – as a quite informative article by Friedhard Teuffel in Der Tagesspiegel points out (Fiddling your way to Olympic victory, reprinted in Die Zeit as Race of the string-pullers), every one of those 110 IOC members charged with voting on the matter had certainly made up his/her mind before the presentations even started. (more…)

It has been a busy first half-year for Hungary. In January that country rather bumblingly stained its first-ever assumption of the European Presidency with a controversial new media law. Now, since Easter, it has a new constitution. But is it any good? One Hungarian, the writer Péter Zilahy, declares in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that it surely heralds “magical times” – but not in any positive sense (cue the tweet!):

Here’s his lede:

A thousand years and no wiser: The new “basic law” of the Hungarians bases itself on Christianity and the Holy Crown. Minister-President Orbán nonetheless speaks of Europe’s most modern constitution. A Budapest farce.

The whole reason for this new constitution was the electoral landslide enjoyed last year by Victor Orbán’s right-wing FIDESZ party, brought about by popular disgust with the moral laxity and economic incompetence displayed by the Socialist government in power since 2002 – back when the Socialists in turn electorally deposed an Orbán government! Actually, that Socialist-led regime even managed to get itself re-elected in 2006, but only through what was revealed after-the-fact as basically a campaign of lies.

In any event, in 2010 FIDESZ was back and with a 2/3 control of the Hungarian parliament that enabled it even to amend the constitution, up to then a legal hodge-podge in fact consisting largely of the Communist-era’s basic law. Now the Hungarians have a new one, with strong rhetorical as well as practical emphasis on Christianity and the family.

Except that for many – even most – post-Communist Hungarians outright Christianity holds little appeal. This certainly includes Zilahy, and that provides the motivation behind his anti-constitution polemic here. “Now then, it can’t do any harm to have God on our side, especially considering we are a secular nation and a secular state,” he snidely observes, and also delves deeper behind that contradiction first mentioned in his lede between a new basic law that is supposed to be so forward-looking yet which invokes Christianity and especially the Holy Crown of Hungary’s first Christian king, St. Stephen I (Szent István; reigned 1000 – 1038 AD).

Of course, if you’re going to invoke St. Stephen, you probably also will prefer to talk about the lands in his kingdom, Zilahy notes, which unfortunately include much more than merely those contained within the post-World War I Hungarian state – and so the arguments with the neighbors start up once again! Oh well, if that’s going to lead to a fight, at least we have Olympic-champion fencer Pal Schmitt (Hungary’s current president) on our side – shades of Lancelot and King Arthur!

(You want further “magical times”? Apparently the “National Creed” which is the preamble to that new constitution declares that the entire 46+ years between the Nazi occupation of Hungary (March 1944) and the first post-Communist elections (May 1990) as legally non-existent! Zihaly doesn’t get around to bringing this up here.)

So let me ask, dear reader: What’s your highest level of education attained? What sort of dwelling do you live in? What’s your yearly income?

Most likely you’re not going to answer, and I understand that. (But for those of you with a burning desire to share, there’s always our Facebook fanpage for commentary and discussion – stick that info right on our wall!) With all respect, I’m not even really interested. But many of those among you who are German citizens will soon have to answer such questions in the upcoming Volkszählung or census.

That’s the taz’s Rolf Lautenschläger who rings the bell loudly to remind his fellow citizens of their upcoming data-provision duties in his editorial We are glassy.

But check out his first sentence (it’s also in the tweet): “There’s a census – and no one is interested.” What – Germans are refusing to obey and fill in the forms? That’s rather hard to believe, especially when you consider that this is the first census in the Federal Republic since 1987, meaning among other things that the whole added territory and inhabitants of the former East Germany have still not yet been properly tabulated! (What’s more, not everyone has to participate in this year’s census, unlike e.g. American practice – it’s property-owners and residents of community-owned property only.)

In fact, there were apparently protests and non-cooperation even against that 1987 census, according to Lautenschläger, but that’s reasonable if you stop a bit and think about it. It’s that infamous bit of German history, of say about 70 years ago – not to mention a feature of everyday East German life called the Stasi – that can understandably raise people’s hackles about the government getting its Leviathan hands on too much private information.

In a way, the reluctance people are already showing to cooperate with this 2011 census is related to that. You may wonder, Lautenschläger writes, why anyone can have objections considering how keen people are to neglect their privacy on such Internet mainstays as Facebook, LinkedIn, and their ilk. (That notion is the inspiration for his piece’s title: “We are glassy,” i.e. it’s easy to see through us to find out what you want.)

But the point is really the opposite. Leave Facebook, etc. to the side – there, we take on voluntarily the privacy risks that we want and that we (think that) we understand. On the other hand, Sony recently perpetrated only the latest in a series of catastrophic breaches of what were supposed to be secured personal data, and there have been some similar home-grown German catastrophes as well (e.g. with Lidl, a supermarket chain, and Deutsche Bahn, where management misused personal data in its fight with unions). Apparently then, Germans-in-the-know are hardly ready to put their confidence in their government’s data-protection abilities. What’s more, they’re likely correct in their suspicions – the former East Germany be damned (and uncounted)!

UPDATE: And you thought I was just being cynical! Check this, again from Die Tageszeitung although not from our friend Herr Lautenschläger:

Translated: “The State emphasizes that Census 2011 data is optimally protected. [However] on-line the first security-holes have appeared,” as freelance (white-hat) experts have gotten to work putting the data defenses to the test. A fake census input-form has even popped up, to which phishing victims can be unknowingly diverted, featuring extra questions not in the original re: sexual preferences! #censusfail, one would have to remark; try again, try better.

More Bin Laden, Bin Laden, Bin Laden . . . It may have been among the most incidental of occurrences in the media uproar following the announcement of his death late last Sunday/early last Monday. But that doesn’t mean that people didn’t notice, or don’t want to seize on it to make a point – even as far away as Germany:

That’s from Berlin’s Die Tageszeitung or taz. (That additional -gezwitscher part actually means “tweeting” in German – now you know!) Even if you’re not up with the language, you can still see that what’s at issue is the rather-too-many mistaken references to “Obama” rather than “Osama” cropping up in that same media uproar, perpetrated by Fox News.

Missed them? No problem. The following YouTube clip from the David Pakman Show – in English, of course – reviews them for you. There were more instances than you might have thought!

Depending on your own media diet, all this Fox flim-flammery might already feel familiar, in an alliterative sort of way. For most in Germany, though, it is unknown and so somewhat shocking. As the taz-reporter Meika Laaff explains:

Whoever watches Fox stations in the USA has an interesting view of the world. There demagogues [Einheizer - literally "fire-lighters"] like Glenn Beck explain the evil connection between Fukushima, the European financial crisis and the Arab Spring.

It doesn’t help that the taz is a leftist paper, based in Berlin, itself well-known as a leftist city, even in Nazi-times. And remember, this is the European Left we’re talking about here, meaning that the typical Fox News audience might as well be living on another planet – and that taz reporters will always be on the look-out for any opportunity to send derision it’s way. Here, Ms. Laaff repeats several times her assertion that the Obama/Osama mix-up is actually deliberate on Fox’s part and intended to undermine respect for the President by way of a subconscious association that sheer repetition can plant in the heads of the unwary.

But give Laaff and her editors some credit as well. It turns out that some German media were guilty of the same Obama/Osama switch, including no less than Chancellor Merkel’s own press secretary*, who Laaff claims issued a tweet that translates to “#Chancellor: Obama responsible for deaths of thousands of innocents, mocked the principles of Islam and all religions.” (Of course that tweet is no longer on-line in that same form, it has been corrected.) The Bild Zeitung and Der Spiegel committed similar errors. (Surprising for the latter, not so much for the former, which is a National Enquirer-style tabloid, but with more-attractive women.)

At the end of her piece Laaff even challenges readers to get in contact by e-mail if it turns out that her taz has made the same mistake. So again, give her credit – not least because all this evidence of Germans having trouble with that Obama/Osama thing rather dilutes her claim that Fox News does it all the time deliberately.

*Equivalent in the US administration to White House press secretary Jay Carney(val Barker).

BTW did you like the no-less-than-three embeds in this post? A new record! I’m actually going to see if I can keep adding them until, at some point, my posts are 100% embed and I don’t have to write anything at all myself!

OK, the Bin Laden thing continues to dominate headlines, but let’s leave the macabre and go back just a short way to happier times – back to Will and Kate! At least Presse Nachrichten (normally just a German on-line outlet for company press-releases) is Will-ing:

Here’s their lede:

Kate Middleton met her prince. Would you like to get to know your prince? Then forget kissing frogs, and instead start thinking strategically, i.e. visit University (ideally Cambridge), do sports (ideally tennis), look for the right job (media or entertainment industry) and pick out carefully the right countries (Scandinavia or Monaco).

All this comes from the social networking site (yet another!) Badoo.com, whose management apparently commissioned a study precisely on winning your own royal prince – as a clever marketing ploy, of course.

Still – you do probably want to know the “7 Golden Rules” they came up with, right? I’ll translate them for you.

1. Think international – almost 50% of all princes marry a foreigner.
   
2. Stay focused on Europe – ideally on Monaco or Scandinavia. [Why? Probably because that's where the most - the best? - of the eligible princes come from, although the study here does implicitly give up on the British Royal Family as too high a goal.]
   
3. Study – universities are the new royal marriage-market.
   
4. Get out your party-pumps – princes like to carouse.
   
5. Be sporty – ideally, play tennis.
   
6. Find a job – ideally in media or the entertainment industry.
   
7. It can’t hurt to be famous – do it and increase your chances.
   

One thing not on this list, you’ll notice, is birth: no need to have any noble blood yourself, since the trend is noticeably towards princes marrying commoners (as was Kate Middleton herself, of course, before she became the Duchess of Cambridge).

And finally: Don’t worry, there are plenty of princes out there! The Badoo.com-sponsored research identified 33 royal families, on four continents, from whose loins – so to speak – they can spring.

“U-S-A! U-S-A!” Europeans woke up to the news, while cheering Americans put off bedtime for a while to go congregate and rejoice. The killing of Osama Bin Laden dominates world news today, while analyses of the consequences and of Bin Laden’s extraordinary life are likely to occupy much print and many pixels in the days to come.

Naturally, such pieces are already forthcoming. One of the best I’ve seen so far comes from an expected source, Prof. Juan Cole’s blog Informed Comment, although it does veer at the end to the realm of personal reminiscences. (The September 11, 2001 attacks were after all the inspiration for setting up that blog, as they were for so many other things e.g. US Army/Marines enlistments.)

Plus, as always Prof. Cole’s treatment is in English, which is not really within the remit of the blog you’re reading now. Let’s turn to Der Spiegel instead:

That link leads to an article entitled The Prince of Terror, by Yassin Musharbash. (Despite the name, a born-and-bred German journalist.) The photo-series you’ll find starting at the article’s head – basically a series of Osama TV-stills – is nothing to write home about, but what Musharbash writes about his historical background is quite interesting. For the world’s premier terrorist could very well have become its leading playboy instead; he was born into quite a wealthy Saudi family, which had made its money in the construction business. But no, he chose religion over worldly things, and became known over his lifetime for his qualities of patience, modest living, and friendliness – “friendliness” to a select few, at least, since he never was so enthusiastic about Westerners and his strict religious convictions kept him from shaking any female’s hand from an early age, as well from any music, photography, or television (except for the news).

Nonetheless, from a position as an outsider he soon became one of the leading heroes within the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation. Of course, it was from the (mostly Arab) fighting elements he assembled there for that original purpose that he would go on to build his “Al-Qaeda” network. (The name in Arabic literally means “network,” as well as a number of other things.) But Musharbash helpfully reminds us of another, later instance when the West’s and Bin Laden’s military interests coincided, namely in Bosnia during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s: A nascent Al-Qaeda then supplied fighters to defend that break-away republic from Serb depredations long before Europe or the US had made up their mind what to do themselves.

The Dutch paper De Volkskrant is also quick off the blocks with its own Profile: This is how Bin Laden became the most-wanted terrorist on Earth. No photo-series this time – but really, by now haven’t we all had to gaze on his face more times than we have really wanted? – just a Bin Laden background, with a couple new and interesting facts. Supposedly he originally started working in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion there just to try to recruit for and supply the resistance, not take up arms himself, but he changed his mind one day when he happened to be attacked by some Russian helicopters. Also, although after his success there he returned to his native Saudi Arabia as a famous hero, he soon fell afoul of the authorities there by shooting his mouth off against them too often, to the point that they confiscated both his passport and much of his property. (Of course, that didn’t stop him from moving to Sudan, by way of Yemen, and thence back to Afghanistan.)

There’s just one strange thing here: the (unnamed) Volkskrant reporter writes about how, even after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Bin Laden still managed to run Al-Qaeda – in a loose way – “with his satellite and computer.” I can easily imagine Bin Laden weilding a laptop (although the power-supply could have been problematic), but not a “satellite” as the world’s authorities keep careful tabs on what’s allowed up into space. Perhaps the author meant “satellite-telephone.”

For those of us living far away it offers the macabre spectacle of beheaded bodies found in the desert, of the patent absence of governmental authority over wide stretches of territory, of naive schoolgirls gamely stepping up to become municipal chiefs-of-police before quickly fleeing north of the border in terror. For those actually located there, it must be a living hell. But as Der Spiegel shows, it’s also possible to take the current Northern Mexican drug wars and cut through to their analytical essence:

It’s fairly simple, writes New York correspondent Marc Pitzke in Dirty business with Death: it’s basically a straight two-way deal of drugs headed one way, weapons the other.

These drug wars constitute a tremendous problem for Mexico – not to mention for any Americans who happen to be traveling there – but the clear implication is that the US bears much of the blame. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted as much two years ago in Mexico City, in a quote Pitzke features here (translated back from the German):

Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fans the drugs-trade. Our inability to stop illegal weapons-smuggling over the border causes the deaths of police, soldiers, and civilians.

Indeed, Mexican weapons-possession laws are among the strictest in the world – on paper. But that doesn’t matter much when, as is generally well-known, their American equivalents are among the loosest. In Texas, Arizona, California, etc. it’s fairly easy to go shopping for, say, AK-47s, in the particular variety and quantity of your choice, after which it’s then just a matter of getting them over the border to Mexican customers. The considerable political firepower (sorry) of the National Rifle Association, the NRA, makes sure this is so, and in fact it was that organization’s 2004 success in getting the national assault-rifle ban to expire that really lit a rocket under weapons-smuggling southwards.

Would that things could just be left at that! It’s the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) that is supposed to throttle this sort of thing, but a recent scandal has arisen in connection with something called “Project Gunrunner.” This is an ATF operation, undertaken since 2006, involving expressly allowing certain gun shipments to make it over to Mexico – in order subsequently to trace those weapons’ serial numbers to gain intelligence on where and with whom they end up.

Sound questionable? Well, grok this: recent undercover journalism (Pitzke mentions the TV network CBS) suggests that, in fact, “Project Gunrunner” lives up to its name rather too well, in that there is evidence (e.g. internal policies, clearly-excessive shipment quantities) that it is the ATF’s intention simply get those weapons to Mexico – for whatever reason – rather than really use them for any sort of investigation.

Meanwhile, as Wikileaks reveals, officials at the US embassy in Mexico City lambast Mexican government officials for their “corrupt” and “risk-avoiding” approach to the drug wars raging within their very borders. All very well, but the Americans should not lose sight either of their very substantial responsibility or the very little that is being done about that.

Now that the warm weather is upon us (at least in much of the Northern Hemisphere; actually, consistent with the name of this blog, I’m mostly talking about Europe), are you on the lookout for the latest “in” beach partying-spot? Stern, the German newsmagazine which has always chosen a rather more risqué tack than its more establishment competitor Der Spiegel, has your answer.

It’s about Bulgaria, specifically a seven-kilometer stretch of coastline on the Black Sea, south of the coastal city Burgas, that’s apparently quite the rage. At least until you look at the name of the article’s author, Milena Mileva*, and realize that the piece – entitled Heading home on all fours – was likely written in Bulgaria and pressed onto the popular magazine’s pages through some sort of non-disclosed commercial arrangement.

That sort of thing wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in Bulgaria – though you’d think it would in Germany – but beyond the endemic corruption the place clearly has much else to offer the vacationer: beaches of pure white sand and clear water, sunny days, picturesque mountains in the background, and cheap, cheap prices (e.g. €1.20 for a large beer). This has been true for decades, nay centuries, and in Communist times many East Bloc comrades, especially from the DDR, would regularly troop down in their Trabants to this bit of coast for much the same reason. (more…)

In German political terms this year of 2011 was always going to be about not any grand national-level election to (possibly) change the faces at the very top, but rather a very numerous series of elections at lower levels of that country’s federal system, none of them of decisive importance in itself but collectively fully capable of pointing to the likely result of the next truly national-level election, scheduled for 2012.

The latest of these occurred last Sunday (among other places) in Baden-Württemberg, the “other” southern federal German state (i.e. the one that’s not Bavaria), and Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party continued its long record of performing poorly in such local elections. To give you a pretty precise idea of what exercises voters in that particular prosperous corner of Germany, it’s generally agreed that the election revolved around just two issues: Fukushima (i.e. “nuclear power is dangerous”) and Stuttgart 21. The Green Party, especially, was on the “correct” side of both questions; so the Green Party won big, more than doubling its share of the vote and climbing to a position where it can lead a coalition state government together with its traditional political ally, the Social Democrat Party. (more…)