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.

                          

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.

                          

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!

                          

And rightly so, for now he is dead, and way too young . . . what’s that? No, I was never talking about Charlie Sheen, this is about the celebrity that was Knut the Polar Bear, whose adventures at the Berlin Zoo this weblog has occasionally covered over the years. Maybe to make myself clear I should have brought up Knut’s being featured on his own postage-stamp, or even the public calls in the past for his castration, but frankly, all of that and more seems well within the capability of the out-of-control 2 1/2 Men once-and-future star.

No, this is about Knut, and I guess I can take a sort of bittersweet pride in having realized, from the very beginning of my coverage, that “it is perhaps the life of a child movie star that provides an even more-exact template to what has been happening with Knut.” You’ll surely know by now that last Saturday, as he was lounging on an island in his Berlin Zoo enclosure (which he shared with the aforementioned three female polar bears – who somehow seemed to want little to do with him) the lumbering grayish bear suddenly stood up, spun around a couple of times, fell into the water and was gone. Well, at least you probably heard that he died; those additional details I got from having the fortune to hear an interview on the BBC World Service with the Berlin Zoo Bear Dept. Head Heiner Klös. The interviewer put Klös on the spot (as BBC interviewers are increasingly wont to do with their subjects in recent years), accusing him of feeding Knut too many of the infamous croissants he was mad about. Yes, OK, there were croissants, Klös stammered in his reply, but mostly the keepers made sure he received the sort of wholesome meat-and-vegetables diet a still-growing young polar bear requires.

Anyway, while Knut was never in what you could call polar bear athletic shape, it’s unlikely it was anything in his diet that caused his death at age 4 – untimely, as polar bears in captivity are routinely known to live forty years or more. Just what it was remains something of a mystery; it was not a tumor, for example, as Christina Hucklenbroich of the FAZ let us know in an article of yesterday, although it did seem to involve some disease in his brain. Nothing in the environment provided to him at the Berlin Zoo was at fault, either – despite calls from no less than the Financial Times Deutschland for polar-bear enclosures across Europe to be subject to “stress tests.” (For real – although I suspect the piece is written tongue-in-cheek.) Nor did it have anything to do with any sort of in-breeding – Knut’s mother was a full-blooded wild polar bear out of Canada, Zoo Director Bernhard Blaszkiewitz assured the assembled press hordes.

Of course, it was that very same mother-bear who started Knut off on his celebrity adventure in the first place by rejecting him and thus making it necessary that he be raised in a rather more public fashion by the zookeepers. And although that life is now at an end, the legend (and, possibly, the need for further coverage here – whatever the traffic will bear, you might say) will surely live on. They want to raise a statue to him; his fur is already in the hands of expert taxidermists at a museum; and, inevitably, you know there is going to be a movie. For – relative to his species, at least – Knut lived fast and he died young: may I suggest “Polar Without A Cause”?

                          

Even as the very day of their opening match has arrived, Nigerian preparations are still incomplete in one important respect, Osodo writes, namely in the financial realm. It’s taken for granted that the players will win some sort of money-bonus from the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) should they succeed in defeating Argentina – but, again, match-day has arrived, and by this point that is hardly sufficient anymore. The way things in Nigeria work, it seems, money has a way of getting lost along the way if it is not pinned down exactly, so that the players really want to know now how much money they can gain, and for what: not just for winning the game, but possibly also a certain sum for each goal, maybe another to whomever might be voted Man of the Match, and the like.

The team coach, recently-hired Lars Lagerbäck from Sweden, is reportedly out-at-sea on this whole matter, as he well might be over something so alien to his Scandinavian cultural assumptions. As for NFF President Sani Lulu Abdullahi, even as he indicated himself willing to “show” the players their prizes before the game, his accompanying remarks could not have set too many minds at ease:

We know that it’s not about money. Each player wants to play at the World Championship and give his best, and our players of course made it clear that for them at this tournament it does not come down to money. But the money could offer an incentive to gain three points [i.e. to be the winning team].

Rather weaselly words, to Nigerian ears. It’s also a shame that we fans are not likely to get any news update – in any language – in time just before the game to learn how things turned out. We could try some big new social-media campaign to agitate to get financial rewards listed on TV just before kick-off, I suppose, right along where the starting line-up is displayed, but I suspect such a suggestion would not go down too well with FIFA officials.

                          

One way you can tell this is truly a “big story” (if ipso facto is not itself sufficient for your reasoning process) is that the weekend is not even over, yet reports of repercussions are already coming in. Here’s a piece from Trouw reporting how the governor of Uruzgan (the province in southern Afghanistan where most of the Dutch combat troops are), Asadullah Hamdam, is already getting worried and has called upon the Dutch government to change its mind. On the other hand, Afghan General Juma Gul Himat, chief of police there, says he’s willing to live with a Dutch withdrawal – for a price. He wants better training, better air support, faster economic development, and better equipment: mine-detectors, helicopters. (Ah, mon cher général – what part of “We’re outta here!” don’t you understand?)

The second half of the Trouw article deals with the issue – also covered here in the Algemeen Dagblad – of whether the Australian troops there in Afghanistan could maybe take over for the departing Dutch. Short answer: they can’t, or at least they won’t. That much the Australian foreign minister, Stephen Smith, has made clear. The Aussies do have around 1,550 troops there in Uruzgan also, with no date fixed for them to leave (although the AD article does mention that that country’s minister of defense, John Faulkner, has already expressed the wish that they be out of there soon), but they’ve got their hands full now with the reconstruction and training activities they’ve already been assigned, thank you very much indeed, mate.

But what also caught my eye was this brief piece by Tobias Müller in the the Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung over Wouter Bos, leader of the PvdA party which broke the present coalition government by, in effect, walking out of it. (All PvdA cabinet members resigned their positions.) The title of Müller’s piece translates (roughly) as “Explosive-meister of the coalition,” a reference to the blame being ascribed to Bos and his PvdA for blowing it up. But, as he astutely notes, that is mostly what Bos’ political opponents – most prominently, the politicians of the CDA and CU – want everyone to believe. An alternate view, which probably is gaining more currency, is that of Bos being the only one around willing to stick to his principles in demanding that the promised and planned end to Dutch involvement in Afghanistan go through – “showing backbone at any price,” as Müller phrases it in his article’s lede. As the author notes, Bos has done so many a time before, although usually in connection with selling something to the members of his leftist Labor Party that they didn’t really want to go for, e.g. abandoning the demand for a national referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, raising the retirement age, weakening workers’ protection against being laid off. Granted, those last two are still just proposals for discussion – but at least they are open for discussion.

The point is that it is this reputation for being a principled politician, not just out to be in the government at any price, which could well stand Wouter Bos in good stead in the campaigning-season about to open for May’s general election. (For what it’s worth – the PvdA and Wouter Bos are hardly the personal electoral preferences of this blogger.)

                          

Wait a second . . . isn’t that the same city that just recently was awarded the right to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games? Indeed it is, as Gerhard Dilger points out in his brief commentary-piece in Berlin’s Tageszeitung or taz: Alarm in the Olympic-city. That sort of bloodshed just won’t do while the Olympics are going on, but at this stage it’s difficult to imagine how it can be stopped: the author cites casualties of 100 people per month at the hands of Rio’s militarized police.

Well, Dilger concludes that it’s simply time for Brazilian politicians, from President Lula da Silva on down, to start imagining harder. A cheap answer is simply to call off the police and let the drug-gangs operate unhindered; while he does not go so far as to advocate that, he does urge thinking hard about how this sort of repression is responsible for making the drug trade so lucrative in the first place. In effect – although he does not state it explicitly – he is advocating drug legalization for Brazil.

At the same time, there needs to be a massive infusion of public investment in those favelas to produce schools, hospitals, public housing, etc. to address the wide gap between rich and poor in Brazilian society that results in the illegal activity that prompts such violence. World cities know anyway when they submit their bids to host the Olympic Games that they need to be ready to make tremendous investments in supporting infrastructure should they succeed in winning them. Dilger asserts here that not only is the same is true for Rio, but that hosting the 2016 Games is a Riesenchance – a gigantic chance – to summon the political will even to go beyond Olympic facility investments to undertake initiatives designed to heal the very real clefts remaining in Brazilian society.

                          

Berlin, on the other hand, is already having to deal with a new (yet also very, very old) method of trying to provoke a cleft within the body politic, as you can see from the above illustration, and as Die Tageszeitung columnist Ines Kappert – that’s a woman’s name – complains about in a brief essay entitled Aha, Titten (which I won’t translate for you from the German; I think you can get the sense on your own). Vera Lengsfeld is the lady with the green necklace, which stands in stark contrast to her more-natural adornments, on the right side of this electoral poster from Germany’s CDU, or Christlich Demokratische Union, also the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is the similarly-adorned lady to the left. Lengsfeld posed explicitly for this poster, while Merkel’s picture comes from her appearance last year at the ceremony for the inauguration of the new Oslo (NO) opera house, where her choice of apparel excited considerable comment in the German media.

Lengsfeld’s figure in this poster is already doing the same now, including from the TAZ’s Kappert, who wonders whether “her woman-ness” (Weiblichkeit) is all that Frau Lengsfeld as challenger from the CDU has to bring to bare in her ongoing electoral challenge in Berlin’s Friedrichshein-Kreuzberg district against the incumbent, Green Party member Christian Ströbele (also known as Hans-Christian Ströbele, a member of the Bundestag since 1998 and in fact quite an active and prominent German parliamentarian). Kappert further:

Whoever reduces a political duel to gender differences is in fact not to be taken seriously. And it is certainly no successful demonstration of a new female self-consciousness that brings its own bosom in opposition to chauvinism in politics – or, as Halina Wawzyniak of Die Linke [the extreme-left German political party] on her posters, her own tushie [GE: "Po," meaning female rear end].

(Sorry, €S fans, I did the best work that I could possibly do with Google Images etc., but still could not locate on-line any sample of that last-mentioned image! Any reader contributions would be appreciated – I might even post the picture as an update!)

Meanwhile, a separate piece in Die Welt reveals that Frau Lengsfeld did not let Merkel know what she had in mind for electoral advertising. Says Frau Lengsfeld: “That the Bundeskanzlerin would never have been able to allow me to do. It was supposed to be a surprise.” Please note that Die Welt reveals her to be 57 years old – and very well-preserved, one must say! (It so happens that Lengsfeld was born in the former DDR and lived most of her life under that regime, as did in fact Bundeskanzlerin Merkel – could this be another example of the infamous East German doping?) Oh, and also worth mentioning: that slogan on the election-poster illustration means “We have more to offer.” Perhaps German politics is finally getting genuinely interesting even for the outside observer (at least of a certain bent).

                          

Actually, I find what’s going on a bit confusing. (I can only try to interpret the Swedish from the Danish that I do know.) Huey, Dewey, and Louie (German: Tick, Trick und Track; I can’t figure out their Swedish names) ask Uncle Donald for money to buy a CD they want; he refuses. He later hears them playing that CD anyway, and asks them where they got the money to buy it. They reply that they downloaded the music onto a CD “which we will have until we can buy the original.” Uncle Donald then gets a mischievous look and says something I can’t grasp, but the duck-triplets answer him with “No, that would be dishonest! There’s such a thing as copyright! The ones who wrote and played the music must have their daily bread!” But Uncle Donald proceeds with his dastardly plan anyway, which namely is to buy one sample of the legitimate original and then burn a whole bunch more copies of the CD and sell them, along with photocopied versions of the CD cover. But who should look through the window and catch him doing this but Uncle Scrooge (Onkel Dagobert in German; Farbror Joakim von Anka in Swedish), who of course owns the record company issuing the CD! It looks like Donald is set to pay a big fine for pirate-copying – except that in the end Uncle Scrooge agrees to let him off, as long as he promises never to do this sort of thing again. (Interestingly, Donald doesn’t actually promise; as the strip ends he’s just saying “Puh!”)

It’s all a big steaming hunk of record-industry propaganda, of course, insinuated into a Disney comic strip. (Although by its own terms it apparently is OK in Sweden to download that album you want once, as long as you sincerely intend to buy an original copy soon – that’s what I found confusing). And the reason why the Taz and DN are reporting it is not only for what it is, but also the fact that this comic was actually reported to Sweden’s consumer ombudsman’s office as “a dishonest and hidden advertising message,” all the worse because it is aimed at children.

The reaction to this accusation by Egmont chief Marika Bark to the DN was swift, apologetic, and conciliatory. Certainly her Donald Duck magazine does not desire to advocate any position in the ongoing controversy over the (in)famous Swedish BitTorrent site Pirate Bay, she declared. Elsewhere on the Net, people got busy taking Egmont’s comic strip panels and filling the dialogue-balloons in with text rather more friendly to the Pirate cause. (Unfortunately, the Taz provides too little information for me to be able to find any of these.) At the same time, though, as the German article points out, a new legal complaint has just been filed against the Pirate Bay, by none other than Disney acting in concert with other film companies, accusing the site of still making films available for illegal download.

                          

The Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung also released a Friday-preview piece yesterday (End-Time scenarios in Iran), which generally agrees with Klein’s evaluation, going on to provide additional supporting details. For one thing, Rafsanjani’s speech is to be televised on Iranian State Television; for another, both the main putative loser of that June 12 election, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, and another high-placed ayatollah who has been supportive of him (as well as formerly serving Iran’s president himself), Mohammad Khatami, will be sitting there in the first row, as we learn from Moussavi’s Facebook page.

Klein indulges in a bit of speculation about what Rafsanjani might say; the Tagesspiegel writer(s) (no by-line; we’ll just use “she”) rather speculates on how this rather astonishing occasion has come to be allowed in the first place. She offers two possibilities: Maybe it’s the result of a behind-the-scenes compromise whereby concessions have been made and assurances put forward so that Rafsanjani intends to make use of it, in effect, to back down and lower the heat now focused on the official government, to “save the Republic.” Or maybe, instead, Rafsanjani has used his still-considerable influence to power his way into the speaking engagement, which the reformers intend to use as an occasion to bring out into the open the very real rifts that have opened up within that official government.

Surrender or else going on the attack, then. Either way, tomorrow figures to be an important milestone of some kind. And the list of quotations which this article’s author goes on to use to round it out strongly imply that the evidence points to the latter, attacking interpretation. There are the recent comments of Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri, still influential but with no official position, who is quoted here at length, declaring among other things that “The Country belongs to the people, and not to anyone else” and comparing the behavior of the present regime to that of the Shah in 1979, earnestly hoping that they won’t imitate him in recognizing “the call to Revolution of the people” too late. Shirin Ebadi, the (female) lawyer and winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize is also quoted here, declaring that the present government has effectively lost its legitimacy through the unacceptable violence it used in suppressing the protests. Possibly most ominously, though, are the comments reproduced here from the website of one Mohsen Rezai, long-time Chief of the Revolutionary Guards, who warns that the whole System is on the brink of an “inner collapse” unless the government and opposition sides can get together to fashion some sort of compromise.