Back to Health Care Reform. I know: the battle’s over, the President is now out doing his victory-lap, and even some Republicans think that, now that it passed, it’s here to stay.

But remember, this is above all a weblog with a European bent, so – if it makes you feel better – I can let you know (from an article in Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel) that a certain turbulence is also currently afflicting that model of social(ist) health care provision, the German Krankenkassen. Those are the non-profit, government-supervised insurance companies that cover the vast majority of Germany’s population and are restricted to basing their premiums solely on the insured’s income. (You’re required to have medical insurance coverage there, of course, with very few exceptions, although if you prefer you can buy it from purely-private, for-profit insurers instead.) As the article reports, the public Krankenkassen are now experiencing extraordinary customer-turnover, often in the hundreds-of-thousands. Why? Because the government authorized them in February to charge those they insure up to €8 (= $10.85) more per month in order to shore up their balance-sheets, and some of them took advantage of that.

That’s right: eight euros per month more! Apparently that’s a deal-breaker for many Germans, who in remarkable numbers have proceeded to resign from the Krankenkassen which implemented the measure (known as the Zusatzbeitrag, or “supplementary contribution”) to go join those which did not. It didn’t help that someone made an elementary mistake about how to implement it, in that they made any interested Krankenkasse have to bill customers directly for the extra amount, rather than just letting it be charged as medical insurance premiums normally are as a wage-deduction collected by employers.

Just a word here, then, to let all interested know that it is not always sweetness & light over where citizens need not worry about medical coverage. (Not that there’s any indication that the firms losing customers are in any danger of going bust – like I say, they are state-supported.)

Mark Espiner is a writer for the Guardian as well as a playwrite/director. He has had a new gig since last autumn, though, writing for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Obviously, comparison between the two great European capitals which that new position causes him to move between (by which I mean Berlin and London, where the Guardian is headquartered) is what his columns are expected to be about and, as a writer on the dramatic arts, it’s only natural that he has devoted most of his attention to cultural issues.

But not exclusively so. One difference between the two cities that leaps out him he describes in his latest piece, The eyes lying in ambush of the CCTV. He remembers back to his first visit to Berlin, a little over a year ago: what accounted for that strange feeling of freedom, of exaltation even, that he felt then while walking through the streets of the city center? Well, you already know the answer from his piece’s title. It was actually the absence of something that inspired such enthusiasm, the absence there of the closed-circuit TV cameras that, as he puts it, “bristle on every corner” in London.

To be sure, Espiner had previously rather perversely made use of his special journalist’s access to aggravate this hang-up of his: he managed to visit a monitoring center in London (a “dingy room, deep below the streets”), where he witnessed officials there using the cameras to zoom in – to a “scary” level of detail – on anyone who seemed “suspicious,” or else interesting to take a close look at for any other reason. Therefore, although coming back to Berlin he does observe a few more Video Überwachung signs than he noticed before, the apparent forebearance on the part of the Berlin authorities to spy on their own citizens is still quite refreshing.

The reason for all that is not hard to grasp: after all, as he does point out, some of those Berlin city authorities not so long ago lived under a Stasi regime, which itself followed a Nazi regime. Still, Espiner warns against any complacency – not necessarily in the face of officialdom suddenly changing its mind and deciding to bring in the cameras, but rather in the form of new private shopping centers and “gated communities” being built, which inevitably bring with them an associated bunch of such cameras, to provide “protection” and “security.”

Anyway, it turns out that you can check out his argument for yourself, as Der Tagesspiegel has taken to posting parallel versions of his columns in English. (No doubt the original English that Espiner wrote them in, of course; this one is called CCTV: Invasion of privacy.) I reveal that to you as a public service, even as it is an unwelcome development since you’ll no longer need the assistance of your neighborhood EuroSavant to read these particular columns from Der Tagesspiegel.

UPDATE: Please also be sure to see this: Spy Cameras Won’t Make Us Safer, from a renowned security expert, and including up-to-the-minute insights on the topic from the recent very professional assassination of that Hamas official in Dubai.

Although the fascinating story of the celebrity polar bear named Knut, resident in the Berlin Zoo, got its start together with the animal himself back during the period that this weblog was taking a multi-year break, we’ve tried to cover subsequent developments of interest concerning this media star who has been visited more than 9 million times, been the object of affectionate comments from high German government officials ranging up to the Bundeskanzlerin herself, and has even featured on a postage-stamp.

The latest Knut developments have unfortunately taken a somewhat bizarre turn, verging on the gothic. As might be expected, there’s a woman involved. Her name is Giovanna, Gianna for short, and she was introduced into Knut’s cage-complex a while back to provide him with a little companionship – and, in particular, to further the fond hope that the two might do some great things together tending towards an enlargement of the stock of polar bears held in captivity. Giovanna, though, revealed a nasty streak in an incident reported by the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel a month ago, when a cormorant (a seabird) found its way into Berlin’s polar bear compound and Giovanna gave it a hit with her paw that left it wounded. Then again, perhaps she was merely defending her man: that same report states that the bird first had “pinched” (gezwickt) Knut’s nose.

Anyway, by that point it was clear that Giovanna was no shrinking violet. Now the German news-magazine Focus is reporting that she is also Knut’s cousin – the two share the same grandfather! Suddenly the thought of those two bearing some polar-bear cubs is no longer so desirable. This from PETA Deutschland spokesman Frank Albrecht: “Knut fans should be aware that only Knut’s castration will allow a lengthy life together with Gianna. All other hopes and desires bring the population of polar bears in captivity even faster to the end that is pre-programmed for them anyway.” This from an organization that is supposed to have Knut’s happiness at heart! (As you may gather, PETA Deutschland advocates simply not holding any polar bears in captivity, at all.)

She was set to be his lover – but she is also his cousin! And now he risks castration! I remarked before on these pages how interest in Knut (and the money resulting from it) understandably started to wane once he stopped being a cute baby polar bear and became a somewhat slovenly-looking teenage one – did Berlin Zoo officials go off in search of a publicist to tell them how to resuscitate interest in Knut and wind up with Tennessee Williams?

I don’t mean at all to denigrate that devastating quake that hit Haiti on Tuesday. As you might imagine, I’ve found nothing interesting (i.e. “different”) about that in any foreign press to pass on here. Then again, it’s hard to think of any aspect of a quake that can be out-of-the-ordinary interesting: it’s usually just a monochrome tragedy, as hordes of people either die or lose the majority of whatever they own.

Unless, perhaps, a quake hits somewhere else while the world remains preoccupied with an earlier one. Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel reminds us that just yesterday a 6.2 Richter-scale earthquake hit just off the coast near the Indonesian town of Manokwari. We don’t know anything about damage or deaths yet, but that’s mainly because we’re talking about the western part of that huge island of New Guinea – it hit just above the big piece of land that looks like some animal’s head, you know the one I mean, the Vogelkop Peninsula.

We do know, however, that no tsunami-warning was given, even though the quake’s epicenter was in the ocean. Is that because there truly was no tsunami, or because the judgment was made that there are not enough genuine population centers in the area to make any such warning worthwhile?

Could this be the opening sparks of a new incarnation of German militarism? The local newspaper Der Tagesspiegel has the report: Kreuzberg vs. Neukölln – with snowballs. Yesterday, in the newest variation on the flash mob phenomenon, 200 to 300 people showed up at 2:00 PM in Berlin’s Görlitzer Park, summoned by the Internet, to fight. To fight for fun, that is, taking advantage of the many inches of snow available everywhere.

It was a contest between residents of those two Berlin neighborhoods, Kreuzberg and Neukölln, waged across the ditch in the park’s middle (with combat photographers in attendance, of course; the on-line article has an amusing YouTube video.) In the end Kreuzberg was declared the winner, controversially, but most by that time were too tired to care and settled down instead to drinking Glühwein (wine mixed with spices, a Christmas drink) and letting a DJ entertain them.

EuroSavant belatedly caught up with the Knut-the-polar-bear story last December here. I observed then that Knut’s life seemed to be careening along the path usually only followed by Hollywood child film stars (e.g. family tragedies; cover shoots; problems with excessive weight).

Sure enough, as the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reports today, the struggle over the Knut-millions is now occupying the courts. Those millions are of course the millions of euros that the (at one time) cute little abandoned polar bear earned for the Berlin Zoo, through the flood of visitors he inspired, souvenir sales, those above-mentioned photo-shoots, and the like. The point of the news-piece is that the Newmünster Zoo (up in northern Germany, which owns Knut’s father and therefore claims an ownership interest in Knut) has now run out of patience with attempts to come up with some agreement with the Berlin Zoo to split up this Knut-money – they’re heading off to the federal court (Landgericht) in Berlin to settle this, as of tomorrow. And step one is to demand that the Berlin Zoo make an accurate accounting of just how much they have earned off of the erstwhile polar bear baby. That amount is alleged to be around €6 million.

This year of 2009 marks a couple of anniversaries calling for celebration, like NATO’s 60th birthday that President Obama traveled to Europe earlier this month in part to commemorate, or likewise the 60th birthday of the Federal Republic of Germany coming up next month. There will be the 220th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, which set off the French Revolution, on July 14th – and then of course, a bit more fresh in the mind, the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination that that symbolized, coming up in November.

As we approach that latter celebration, a tiny but interesting detail has emerged concerning the exact sequence of events behind that “Fall of the Wall” on the evening (Central European Time) of 9 November, 1989. What that was basically all about was a massive swarm of citizens of East Berlin flooding to the Wall crossing-points – and then, indeed, over the border into West Berlin as they desired – motivated by the widespread belief that, in a drastic break from previous policy, the East German authorities would henceforth actually allow them to cross rather than shooting or at least arresting them, as would have previously been the case ever since the Wall’s erection starting on 13 August 1961. That understanding stemmed from a statement at a news conference just earlier that evening by Günter Schabowski, a member of the East German Politburo, to the effect that the full Politburo had decided to introduce a new travel policy allowing free movement by East German citizens to the West – whose coming-into-effect was said to be “immediate.” (more…)

It now looks like an agreement is in place to let Russian natural gas shipments to the West resume with independent monitors from the European Union in place, but those have been blocked completely since Thursday (8 January) and it will take about a further three days to resume full service. In the meantime, unfortunately, the continent has suffered under a bitter cold spell, so that the political pressure from freezing constituents has already reached the breaking-point – I wouldn’t really call it the “boiling-point” – in Slovakia. As a number of press outlets report, among which Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel, Slovak premier Robert Fico announced at a Saturday evening televised press conference that his country would bring back on-line the atomic reactor at Jaslovské Bohunice that it had just shut down before the end of 2008.

Gee, why did the Slovaks go and close that reactor in the first place a few weeks ago? Namely because doing so, and doing so permanently by the end of 2008, was a provision in the accession agreement by which the country became a EU member-state back in 2004 in the first place. With the Jaslovské Bohunice reactor we’re talking in fact about the very first nuclear reactor in the former Czechoslovakia, whose construction began back in 1958 although it first went into operation only in 1972. Naturally, then, it’s a reactor built in the Soviet style, which in the light of such incidents as Chernobyl raised safety concerns to such a degree that the EU insisted that Slovakia eventually shut it down. (more…)

I wrote in this space almost a week ago about economic policy chaos in the German government, and a new piece in Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel confirms that that bunch has become little more familiar with actual economic reality in the interval. Steinmeier warns EU-partners about turning away from the Stability Pact is the headline; the lede: “Germany’s Foreign Minister is worried about finances. Not in connection with the current crisis, but the stable euro. He takes the other EU-lands to task – they need to follow the euro-rules again soon.”

Don’t recall the Stability Pact (more properly, the EU Stability and Growth Pact)? That’s too bad, since it was a favorite topic of this weblog back in the day, especially in 2003. It’s the agreement that underpins the euro, and in fact preceded the formal establishment of the euro, by which all EU states (but especially those using the euro as their currency) pledge to keep their budget deficits to 3% of their GDP or less, and to either keep their national debt below 60% of GDP or – if it already is above that level – to make steady progress in getting it so that it’s below. The idea is to prevent euro-using states from taking advantage of the euro’s benefits (e.g. lower interest rates for their government debt) while at the same time undermining its stability through profligate government spending. All that commentary back in 2003 mostly had to do with the revelation of the ugly political reality that Germany and France – the Union’s heavyweight countries – could violate the Pact whenever they wanted, without facing adverse consequences, all while lesser states (Portugal, the Netherlands) were still forced to take it seriously. Ironically enough, this was a German initiative in the first place, required in exchange for their willingness to give up the deutsche mark, to keep those profligate Latin countries (like the Italians) from ruining the common euro-project. (more…)

The following post is meant as a public-service “heads-up” message to one Ms. B. Spears.

Britney darling: I know that China is high on your list of tour destinations – “exploding market,” “millions of rabid fans,” and all that. But it looks like you’ll just have to cross it off. The authorities there seemed determined to seriously cramp your style. I mean it: forget about it.

This we learn today from an article in Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel, entitled Peking wants to punish “playback-singing.” What is this are they talking about? Yep, you guessed it: lip-synching. That’s could be a strict no-go soon, punishable by Chinese law as “fraud towards the public” (Betrug an der Öffentlichkeit, although I suspect the Chinese use yet another phrase for official purposes). In fact, the Chinese Culture Ministry is considering making not only lip-synching but also instrument-synching (or whatever you call pretending to play your instrument against the pre-recorded sound of it playing the required tune) against the law. (more…)

On this seventh anniversary-day of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the top news-story is probably the joint appearance at Ground Zero by the two main US presidential candidates. In addition to whatever they may have to say, the occasion will be worth savoring for the all-too-temporary respite it should provide in the ugly partisanship that has prevailed as of late (e.g. the utterly-contrived “lipstick-on-a-pig” contretemps). I hope to be able to cover foreign observations of and reactions to that Ground Zero ceremony in this space sometime in the coming days.

For today, though, I think that it would be suitable to turn our attention to the supposed ultimate source of that al-Qaeda attack, and also the first target for retribution by US forces in its aftermath. That is of course Afghanistan, or specifically al-Qaeda as embedded within a Taliban host environment. Actually, putting it that way shifts the proper focus a slight bit from Afghani territory per se to the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan lying along the Afghani border. These are hardly “federally administered,” they are in fact a region completely out of the control of the Pakistani government, where various varieties of “neo-Taliban” and Muslim fundamentalist forces are based (including, it is thought, what is left of al-Qaeda), and from which these forces sally forth to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.
(more…)

Yes, today is that much-anticipated day when the $9 billion machine switches on at the facilities of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), located in the neighborhood of Geneva and the Swiss-French border: much-anticipated because of the insight the LHC is supposed to provide into the universe’s original “Big Bang,” but also because of the possibility that some scientists have pointed out that its atom-smashing risks creating a black hole that could suck in the Earth and turn it inside-out.

Except that today is really not LHC Day at all, as Lewis Page writing at The Register (motto: “Biting the hand that feeds IT”) steps in to point out, even making that message his piece’s title. (more…)

It looks like the Obama presidential campaign finally sent out its promised and long-awaited SMS message announcing its choice of Joe Biden for vice-presidential nominee at that storied hour of 3:00 AM on Saturday. While that meant that all but the most obsessive American politics-junkies would have to wake up to learn of the news, over here in most of Europe (on Central European Time) it was already 9:00 in the morning and we were getting impatient over our coffee and breakfast for the Word. (Admittedly, a couple of hours previously outlets like the BBC World Service were already passing along the likelihood that it would be Biden, based upon key clues – such as the departure of an Obama campaign jet from Chicago’s Midway Airport headed for Delaware – tracked down by the American press.)

Now that Word has come, together with a presentation to the public of the combined ticket at a gala event in Obama’s political hometown, Springfield, Illinois. And while the McCain has already come forward with its response, so have commentators in the European press. (more…)

Sorry, the Olympics get started today, but that doesn’t mean that EuroSavant coverage will be dominated by them. You wouldn’t want that anyway, no? . . .

One aspect of the ongoing crisis around the alleged attempts by the Iranian government to develop nuclear weapons that usually goes unexamined is the attitude of Arab states, especially those in Iran’s immediate neighborhood. (Well, it’s true that the vagaries of the Iraq-Iran relationship have certainly received their fair share of attention – but let’s treat that as a special case.) Sami Al Faraj, President of the Kuwait Centre for Strategic Studies (all I could find on the Net was this), gives an enlightening interview to Der Tagesspiegel about the Gulf state perspective on Iran (specifically, that of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia) in the article “Against Iran Much Harder Economic Sanctions Are Necessary”. (more…)

As everyone is well aware, the Beijing Olympic Games are coming up this weekend, and so while everyone has to wait a few more days for the athletic spectaculars to begin, the focus of media attention is falling mainly on the host city that is setting the stage. Will the air be clean enough? (The jury is still out; we might not know until the actual dates when the particularly atmosphere-sensitive events – e.g. running, bicycling – are scheduled.) Will the authorities allow free access to information, mainly via the Internet, to enable visiting journalists to do their work? (That one is still touch-and-go as well.)

On-the-scene reports are now popping up in the media to give the outside world a sense of how the Chinese capital city has been improved and “cleaned up” in preparation for the Games, with the accent on the often extreme measures that the authorities have taken to do that. Jen Lin-Liu has a piece in today’s NYT (Beijing Under Wraps) touching on many of these below-the-surface measures, invisible to foreigners just now flying in to take part in some way in the Games’ staging. (Few foreigners, it turns out, will be flying in just to serve as spectators, if Lin-Liu’s description of the newly-stringent visa regulations is any indication.) (more…)

Ben Smith, from Politico.com had the scoop first, about how the personal prayer-note that Barack Obama stuck into a crack in Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, according to long-standing tradition, was snatched up shortly afterwards by a “yeshiva student” and conveyed to the Israeli newspaper Maariv, which published it.

This led to the sort of furor you would expect, abroad but especially in Israel, since these sort of messages are supposed to be sacred and to be read by no one else than s/he who wrote them – and God. (more…)

You might have been aware that the New York Times recently raised the hackles of the John McCain presidential campaign by rejecting an editorial it had submitted to be published on that paper’s Op-Ed page, when it had published one by Barack Obama the week before.

Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report promptly stepped in to publish on his site the spurned editorial. But now it seems Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel has stepped in to perform a similar service, translated into German of course: Obama Has Learned Nothing from History – perhaps a little counterpoint-reading to the speech from the Democratic Party candidate coming up on Thursday evening (CET).

Some EuroSavant entries virtually write themselves. What’s the hottest thing going on now on the American scene – or, put another way, where can you find all of America’s top TV anchor-persons?

Super Star!

Traveling with Obama, of course! And while the itinerary to the first part of his overseas trip – to the Middle East and South Asia – is somewhat unclear, deliberately for security reasons, we can be more sure about where he is going to be in Europe during the second half, and when. Everyone knows already that the high point – the only public address he is scheduled to give – will occur in Berlin next Thursday evening, 24 July. There’s already been somewhat of a controversy over where he is to be allowed to give that speech. That has now been resolved, but let’s take a look at what further details are available from local Berlin sources. (more…)

This story came to me via the trusty RSS reader from the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel (also picked up by Die Zeit) – a handy reminder about life and culture (and death) “on the other side,” in this case in Saudi Arabia. But the German article stated straight-off that it was just passing on reporting from the Arab News, which happens to be an English-language on-line publication so, without further ado, any reader interested in this case’s down-and-dirty details is directed thereto.

Here’s what it’s all about: It seems that last year one Sabri Bogday, a Turkish barber working in the Saudi city of Jeddah, rather lost his head and started insulting publicly both God and the Prophet Mohammed in his barbershop. (more…)

It is “The Who” who sing it on the album The Who Sell Out (1967):

Welcome to my life, tattoo
I’m a man now, thanks to you
I expect I’ll regret you
But the skin graft man won’t get you
You’ll be there when I die
Tattoo

(And they sing it so sweetly, too: just savor the descending harmony at the end of this chorus. If you don’t already know it, you can get some of the melodious flavor of the song from Amazon with Windows Media Player and with Real Player, although unfortunately these extracts don’t include that stretch of harmony of which I speak.)

Ah, but it doesn’t have to be the “skin graft man” anymore – these days tattoos can be erased by a procedure involving a laser. As it happens, and as the lead to a recent article in Berlin’s Tagesspiegel reports (Bleibende Schönheit, or “Beauty That Sticks Around”), “Many British want to be rid of their tattoos.”

(Just before we go “under the fold,” let me add that The Who Sell Out was quite a remarkable concept album, one of the first of that genre, with station-jingles and faux commercials interspersed between the individual songs. The schtick was to make the entire album sound like a pop music program from one of the “pirate” radio stations, broadcasting those days from ships out in adjoining international waters, outside (or so they thought) of UK regulatory jurisdiction. Consistent with all this, the front and back of the LP/CD cover features the boys of the band individually posing for mock product advertisements: Heinz Baked Beans, Odorono (some type of deodorant; probably fictitious), etc. Later on, in the late 1980s, the band would embark on “reunion tours” actually explicitly sponsored by companies such as Budweiser. But then they had also sung “I hope I die before I get old” back in 1965 – and three of the four original band members made it into the 21st century thirty-five years later. One’s attitudes often tend to change as one grows older, I’m given to understand.) (more…)

Ronald Reagan died late last Saturday, just in time for reactions in all the big Sunday editions of American newspapers. But Sunday editions of European newspapers are rare (let alone – to temporarily borrow a term from McDonalds – “super-sized” editions; those appear on Saturdays, if at all). Rather, reactions and assessments of the meaning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency appeared on Monday, meaning that today, Tuesday, it’s time for EuroSavant to step in and give you a flavor of those.

From the other usual-suspect sources you can get briefed, scattered reaction from English, Arabic, French, and Spanish sources. (But really: only a brief mention from Libération for the French press? No Le Figaro, no Le Monde? We wouldn’t stand for that here at this web-site!) So let’s give the EuroSavant treatment to German coverage. That’s very appropriate, as Reagan’s relations with that country during his eight-year presidency were extremely interesting, with wild highs and lows. (more…)

President Bush kicked off on Monday night his five-speech offensive to demonstrate to American voters (primarily) and also to the rest of the world that he has a plan for effectively handing off “sovereignty” to some native Iraqi administration at the end of June. That same day Britain and the US had tabled a proposed UN Security Council resolution which, if adopted in the proposed form, would leave occupation troops able to remain in Iraq indefinitely even as that native administration would supposedly be granted the “responsibility and authority to lead a sovereign Iraq.”

Coverage of the President’s speech in the German press generally found it less than fully convincing. (more…)

As you all well know, almost-simultaneous bombs set off in several Madrid commuter trains during the morning rush-hour last Thursday killed over 200 people, and wounded many, many more. Then Spanish general elections followed on Sunday; in a result that took many observers by surprise, the Spanish Socialist and Workers’ Party, i.e. the opposition, emerged as the winner, with that party’s leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, posed to take over as prime minister instead of the hand-picked successor (Mariano Rajoy) to José Maria Aznar of the ruling (right-wing) Partido Popular.

Aznar of course had been one of US President George W. Bush’s stoutest allies when it came to the War in Iraq, and 1,300 Spanish troops are still stationed in the Polish sector there. Mounting evidence suggests that last Thursday’s massacres on the rail-lines of Madrid were the work of some sort of Arab-linked terrorist organization; so that the thought has come to not-a-few that Spain was being punished for that support for the US with these attacks, and that the Spanish electorate reacted to them drastically by removing the regime that would bring this sort of punishment down on them.

So: Is Aznar’s loss a victory for terrorists? That question is posed in an on-line article by Kathleen Knox from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. It is answered in the affirmative in today’s New York Times by regular columnist David Brooks – he asks in his column Al Qaeda’s Wish List “What is the Spanish word for appeasement?”, although he also claims to be resisting the conclusion that “swing Spanish voters are shamefully trying to seek a separate peace in the war on terror.” That’s basically the same answer given by Edward Luttwak, on the very same NYT Op-Ed page, in Rewarding Terror in Spain, which starts out “It must be said: Spanish voters have allowed a small band of terrorists to dictate the outcome of their national elections.” (But the NYT editorial board disagrees.)

But that’s all English-language; you already know about all that. Let’s check what the German press has to say. (more…)

Yesterday a court in Hamburg, Germany, found a 31-year-old native Moroccan, Abdelghani Mzoudi, innocent of charges that he had been involved in the Hamburg-based terrorist cell behind the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington. Naturally, American officials are hardly pleased by this verdict. Turning first to the account you’ve all probably already seen in the New York Times establishes the basic facts here: presiding judge Klaus Rühle ordered Mzoudi acquitted not because he thought him innocent, but because not enough evidence had been presented to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And that was partly due to the refusal by American authorities to make intelligence information available to the German prosecutors working for Mzoudi’s conviction.

What does the German press say? (more…)

Today we finish up our look at the Euro 2004 Group D (“Group of Death”) reactions, this time out of the German press. And there’s certainly plenty there – aided by the fact that the German on-line newspapers, helpfully, don’t follow the practice of enclosing their articles behind for-pay barriers once they get the least bit old.

Die Welt probably has the most complete coverage, headed by an article eloquently entitled Ausgerechnet Holland, or “Of All Teams – Holland!”, complete with a photo at the top of German national team coach Rudi Völler looking very anxious. (more…)

Yesterday marked the first day of the two-day Iraq donors’ conference in Madrid. I’ve chosen the German press as the prism through which to review events at and surrounding that conference; it usually gives good, comprehensive coverage, and what’s more, in this situation it represents a country which you suspect doesn’t want to be at that Madrid conference in the first place. (Germany’s delegation there is headed not by a political minister – the Minister for Developmental Aid, Heidemarie Wieczoreck-Zeul, might at least have been appropriate – but by her top civil servant, state-secretary Erich Stather.)

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung covers Madrid thoroughly, in two on-line articles, the lead one of which is entitled At the Construction-Site of an Iraqi Marshall Plan. (more…)

Perhaps a solution to the Italo-German tiff that has been the subject of recent €S entries was there all along, in Bundeskanzler Schröder’s very backyard – if he could have only thought of it in time. But it’s too late now: the Love Parade, that yearly festival in honor of techno-music and “Love” generally held in Berlin’s Tiergarten kicked off on schedule yesterday despite past threats to its very existence from the Berlin municipal authorities. An emergency (federal German) government allocation for flying Italian opinion-leaders up to the German capital to take part might have worked wonders for relations between the two countries. As the on-line photographs accompanying German press coverage make clear, instead of “blonde beasts” they would have encountered quite a few “blonde beauties,” ready to party (or, indeed, even “blond breasts”), with no other thought than to “invade” their own city park, and to a techno beat. (more…)

Sorry, today I’m not going to cover the G8 summit on Lake Geneva, at Evian. From the press coverage you indeed get the impression, as Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times (registration required) puts it, of “a messy family reunion,” where the main thing people are interested in is who avoids whom, who smiles at whom, who shakes whose hand and how enthusiastically, etc. This even in the German press, as in Die Welt’s Versöhnlicher Handschlag (“handshake of forgiveness”), or the FT Deutschland’s Bush schenkt Schröder drei Minuten (“Bush grants three minutes to Schröder”). Then, on the other side of the police barricades, you just have whatever credibility the arguments of the “anti-globalists” retain being trashed along with the cars and shop-windows that are the target of that minority of demonstrators who see the occasion as another chance to have some violent fun and quite likely get away with it, since the police can’t bash or arrest them all.

Apparently the summit continues on into today, so the press coverage will likely merit a better look later on. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder didn’t even make it out to the lake until late last night, but he had a good excuse: He was busy at a special congress of his Social Democratic Party (SPD), gaining party approval for an ambitious program of retrenchment of Germany’s welfare state that he calls “Agenda 2010.” That, as even the Guardian points out in today’s leader, is the sort of major development that merits attention. (more…)

Yesterday (9 April 2003) apparently was, as The New York Times’ William Safire (registration required) put it, “V-I Day” – “Victory in Iraq Day.” So how did yesterday’s scenes of Iraqi civilian jubilation and statue-toppling go down in the press of our NATO allies who showed themselves rather reluctant to get involved in the program of Iraqi “regime change”? For today, a few observations from German sources: (more…)

In the German Tagespiegel Malte Lehming offers an interesting commentary (“Jubel will gelernt sein” or “Rejoicing needs to be learned”) on why American expectations to be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi population were disappointed. (more…)