Zounds! When you finally get a bunch of people willing to stick their heads above the political parapet, why do people become so intent on shooting them down?

For there’s a new political party in Germany, as of a week ago last Sunday, the Alternative for Germany. Here’s a taste of their homepage, so you can see what they’re about:

Chose the Alternative!
Enough with this Euro!
The Federal Republic of Germany is stuck in the most difficult crisis in its history. The introduction of the Euro has proved itself to be a fatal mistake, that threatens the prosperity of us all.
The old parties are all crusty and worn-out. They persistently refuse to recognize and correct their mistakes.
Therefore we have founded the ALTERNATIVE FOR GERMANY!

Whether you welcome this development I suppose depends on what you think of the euro. At least it testifies to the openness of the German political scene, that a new party can be founded so easily. There are drawbacks to that as well, though, as any political scientist could tell you. Anyway, any party has to receive at least 5% of the vote in any German parliamentary election – state or federal – to get its members into that parliament. Lately it had seemed that the only new political parties being formed were from the Nazi fringe. (more…)

Hold on a minute, now – what is this I see?

“Marathon tragedy: After Boston the old Bush Sound is there again”! The point Torsten Krauel of Die Welt means here follows directly in his lede:

When US President Obama publicly pronounced [on yesterday's Boston Marathon double-bombing], many were reminded of his predecessor Bush twelve years ago.

What he is talking about here, apparently, is Obama’s promise “We will find who did this, and we will find out why they did this. Any responsible groups will feel the full weight of justice.” You see, it sounds just like Bush with the megaphone, standing atop the World Trade Center rubble: “We will find out who destroyed these buildings . . . and they will hear from us soon.”

This is just a terrible article, really surprising coming from what is probably Germany’s most-respected national daily – not at all a “tabloid-quality” paper in its usual incarnation, despite my headline. Where is the well-deserved contempt for George W. Bush that we were used to hearing across-the-board from the European press (with maybe some Polish exceptions)? Where is the recollection that, in fact, the 9/11 attacks came about just over a month after the CIA and FBI had their “hair on fire” over increasing indications that something big was about to happen domestically – but August, 2001 was W’s vacation month, so he couldn’t be bothered to act? No, the only proper Obama-Bush link here would have to be, if any, the bizarre time-reverse one where Bush’s 2001 performance is said to come up short compared to Obama in 2013!

You want a better assessment of George W. Bush’s legacy in reaction to the 9/11 attacks? Conveniently, that’s also available to you today on the NY Times website, although overshadowed of course by the Boston news reports: U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Review Concludes.

But wait! There’s more! (more…)

Solar power: Sorry, but the US is not tops here, for one thing Congress is still mired in recriminations about the loan guarantees that went to the bankrupt Solyndra. As for the Chinese, they have made rather more progress, to the point of allegedly “dumping” polysilicon solar panels on the US market.

But it’s the Germans who are really into solar. They claim to be the world’s biggest solar market at present. And they have just scored a major coup, as we hear from Die Welt:

Yes, there’s still a heck of a lot of oil in Saudi Arabia, but there is also quite a lot of sun constantly beating down on its desert sands. And the Saudi authorities are sensible enough to want to do something to exploit that. Well, that’s understating things somewhat: they want to invest $109 billion through 2032, so that by that time they want to be generating 25 gigawatts of power from solar-thermal plants, and a further 16 gigawatts from photovoltaics.

It’s a German “civil society initiative” called the Desertec Foundation (site in English) that is about to sign an agreement with the Saudi governement to be in on the ground floor of this effort, by establishing a Saudi company to be called “Desertec Power” whose mandate will be “above all planning, execution, local value-added [Wertschöpfung] and running the installations,” but also the “closely related themes of education, training and employment.”

Apparently Desertec Power will rely mainly on so-called Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology, which is not photovoltaic but rather uses parabolic mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays in salt-water tanks and thereby store the energy, so that it’s available even when the sun goes down – and also can contribute in some way to providing desalinated water, another thing the Saudis prize highly.

You can click through to peruse the photo at the top of the article if you need some idea of what CSP arrays look like. (It’s a picture of them in Spain; they’re not yet in Saudi Arabia, the contract hasn’t even been formally signed!) Here in this post I’ll give you instead the grip-&-grin photo of the two principals in this deal. And just as with a Saudi official you can expect a name along the lines of Ahmed al-Malik (whom we see to the right, in Arab garb), with Germans I’m afraid you sometimes run the risk of silly-sounding names: that’s Dr. Thiemo Gropp to the left. And Thiemo has got the desert-dollars.

Uh-oh. It seems a certain American English expression is spreading overseas, and not one we might prefer:

This is of course the Twitter-link to Die Welt’s recent coverage of that ordeal of the “fiscal cliff” (Finanzklippe in German, if you’re interested). And, since it’s a reliable way to let others provide you with grist for your column (just ask the NYT’s Thomas Friedman, for example), journalist Ansgar Graw gives us here, right off-the-bat, a cabbie interview. The driver’s name’s Timothy, he comes from Jersey, and at least he’s capable of keeping a civil tongue as he transports Graw to his DC destination. “If I can’t make ends meet with my money,” he observes, “I can’t simply demand more from you [or "youse guys"?]. I have to start saving. But what does Washington do? They raise taxes, to avoid the ‘fiscal cliff’!”

That’s quaint. First rule of Macroeconomics: the family budget is a faulty analogue for the financial issues of a government, particularly one in charge of its own currency. Back to the Congress, Graw attributes all that profanity flying around to the “frayed nerves” left over from the recent brinksmanship. He errs, however, when he tells his readers that John Boehner’s headline “request” to Harry Reid occurred “in the White House lobby” – accounts rather place the incident to just outside the Oval Office, as both Congressional leaders were waiting to confer with President Obama.

Maybe we shouldn’t begrudge Boehner his letting-off of a little steam, though, because (as Graw notes, and everybody knows) an equally fraught confrontation over the US debt ceiling is less than two months away. Speaker Boehner might even be out of a job by then: he was left high-and-dry when his House Republican majority refused to back his “Plan B” budget program of December’s last week, and his immediate deputy, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, was careful to vote “No” himself on that “fiscal cliff” legislation.

UPDATE: Goodness, goodness. Now this completely uncensored bit from Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza:

Apologies to anyone who needs them, this blog has never claimed to be G-rated. The occasion for this particular tweet, by the way, is a Gazeta twit – just click through to behold his mugshot – who needed an attention-getting title for his time-line editorial recounting the “fiscal cliff” craziness.

You’ve heard about the latest EU member-state to get in line for bailout assistance, right? It’s small, but it’s financial needs are anything but. It’s Cyprus. But it’s also a beggar with a difference, namely a rather too-close relationship to Russia.

Germany’s Die Welt has a great run-down of the situation on that Mediterranean isle, so far-flung that it might as well be considered Middle Eastern. But no, as of 1 May 2004 Cyprus has been an EU member-state, as of 1 January 2008 in the Eurozone. And as of a week ago last Sunday it is EU Council president! This despite all the international intrigue swirling around it, as sketched in this Die Welt piece, which reads like something out of a spy novel. (more…)

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…)

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.”

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!

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…)

On Sunday 3 October the run-off election is scheduled for Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Potsdam, that city of around 150,000 inhabitants just to the southwest of Berlin which was Frederick the Great’s capital and garrison-town and now is the capital of the state of Brandenburg. There’s a run-off because in the regular election, last Sunday, no one candidate got a majority of the votes, so the competition has now been narrowed down to the top two. Lying as it does within the former East Germany, Potsdam is not surprisingly a rather left-wing place, so it’s no surprise that those two candidates represent Germany’s main leftist party, the Social Democrats (SPD), in the person of incumbent Oberbürgermeister Jann Jacobs, and the formation even more to the left, namely The Left (Die Linke), represented by one Hans-Jürgen Scharfenberg.

Jacobs has been Potsdam’s mayor for a while now, since March of 1999, and he did come out on top of that initial vote with 41%. But Scharfenberg was not all that far behind at 33%, and the guy does have many useful qualities, such as being a shrewd judge of people’s character, and able both to keep a secret and submit thorough, informative reports. How do I know this? Because Hans-Jürgen Scharfenberg is also unique as the first significant German political candidate known to have been an informer back in the day for the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi. (more…)

The reviews are streaming in now of President Obama’s Oval Office address to the nation last night about BP and the catastrophic oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico – including those originating over here on the Atlantic’s East side, even though only extreme Obama-junkies or else paid political reporters stayed awake into early Wednesday morning to actually watch it live.

It was apparently a rather long speech, with a panoply of various points within it that one can choose among to emphasize – also, if desired, the sheer fact that it was delivered from the Oval Office, something that is generally supposed to denote an especially serious occasion, as Viktoria Unterreiner points out writing for the German paper Die Welt. Still, the title of her piece is “Obama declares the end of ‘cheap oil’,” and that is one aspect of the President’s address that certainly has attracted particular attention over here. Namely: Can America – the land of the Chevy Corvette and Route 66 – really wean itself from cheap oil, even while spurred on by tarred beaches and dying pelicans? Unterreiner is herself doubtful; she notes that, after Obama made that declaration, “he however became no more concrete” about how to go about it. Perhaps a start would be his CO2/climate bill – but that’s currently in “suspended animation” (im Schwebe-zustand) in the Congress. (more…)

One key factor affecting the entire ongoing Eurocrisis was known to cognoscenti as “NRW” – short for Nordrhein-Westfalen, the German state whose local elections on May 9 did much to influence both the nature and timing of Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel’s response to the grave threat to the euro and even the EU arising from the Greek financial problems. That is well and good, but those same NRW elections at the same time had another rather different significance for a separate voting bloc, one not necessarily so interested in the mere potential for collapse of the common European currency. These citizens are overwhelmingly young and male; they usually converse in Java and C++ as easily as in their native German; and they vote for the German Pirate Party, whose disappointing results in that same ballot saw its share of the overall vote drop to 1.5% from the full 2% share it had enjoyed during last Fall’s nationwide election.

You might recall that this political organization, like all the off-shoots of the original Pirate Party in Sweden, takes for its purpose advocacy mainly for Internet-related issues such as copyright reform, digital civil rights, and the prevention of Internet censorship. Philip Kuhn of Die Welt recently sat down with party leader Jens Seipenbusch for a brief interview in the wake of those poor electoral results. (more…)

Just like mushrooms popping up after spring rainfall (at least as they do here in Northern European climes) comes a new journalistic phenomenon: some pre-planned world-scale event occurs in China (e.g. the 2008 Olympics, the recent opening of the Shanghai World Expo) and is immediately followed by articles in the American press taking a bemused look at the stumbles of the Chinese as they try to come to grips with the English language, efforts that produce something usually termed “Chinglish.” The latest instance of this is a recent article in the NYT together with the almost-indispensable accompanying slide-show displaying some prime Chinglish examples (e.g. “Slip and fall down carefully”).

It’s often pretty funny stuff. Then again, another thought may come to anyone inclined to think about such things a bit more deeply. (And/or to those quick to take offense – or are these two cohorts actually one-and-the-same?) Could it be that the “paper of record” of one great civilization is, in effect, mocking the citizens of yet another for their well-intentioned struggles in navigating the former’s language? When, in fact, relations between these two great civilizations are of possibly the most crucial importance to world peace as well as progress on most other global-scale problems (e.g. environment, trade, financial regulation)? (more…)

One side-detail of the tragic plane-crash on Saturday that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski along with much of that country’s political, military, and even financial elite was that the reason all these worthies were headed to a Russian provicincial backwater like Smolensk in the first place was to participate in a very solemn ceremony there. That was to have commemorated the mass-execution, which began exactly seventy years ago, of around 20,000 Polish officers and other prominent citizens by the Soviet secret police, who had had them fall into their hands as a result of the USSR’s invasion of Poland (coordinated with Hitler’s Germany) in September, 1939. This prompted some commentators to write ponderously of a doom-laden Katyn parallel: Poland’s intelligentsia wiped out there in 1940, and then once again in 2010.

Unfortunately, these grim events are now totally obscuring the remarkable progress represented by the very fact that such a delegation of eminent Poles, headed by the President, was being allowed to go there in the first place – and by the no-less remarkable fact that Russian premier Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk had in fact participated in a commemoration ceremony there just last Wednesday. Looking back now at news coverage of these developments – that is, written before this past weekend’s tragedy – produces a very bittersweet feeling, especially from two articles on the Katyn legacy from among the elite of the German press, here the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt. In particular, the latter piece begins with the sentence “Seldom has the Polish public looked at Russia with so much hope as in these days” – on a webpage where, at the very same time, you can click over on the right-hand side (under “Current Videos”) to see a news-film of rescuers searching through the crash-site in the Russian forest!

(By the way, you could be sure that the German coverage of Katyn’s legacy was going to be thorough and high-quality, and not only because Germany’s sheer size of population and cultural inheritance ensures good journalism. Remember that, for decades, it was German soldiers who were alleged to have been at fault here, so you can be sure that German journalists will always be on top of this story to ensure the historic record remains set straight.) (more…)

The tales of mistreated youth at these institutions are continuing to multiply. There was sexual abuse coming from those who were supposed to care for them, to be sure. But far more pervasive was the intimidating atmosphere, often accompanied by violence: heads shoved down toilets; beatings; even confinement for extended periods in cells, like common criminals.

I’m not making any of this up, as I will shortly document, at least for those of you who read German. Yet long-time readers of this weblog – Hi Mom! – will remember my fondness for the “false lead,” where impressions about what a given blogpost is about gained from its opening lines turn out to be wildly off-the-mark. Surely I am describing here the Roman Catholic institutions, run by paedophile priests, whose reputations are now being blackened by accusations leveled against their administrators by former inhabitants? Actually, no; taking as my cue a new article by Alan Posener in Die Welt (Brutal daily life in DDR youth institutions), I am referring to the establishments for problem youths set up and run by the former Communist East Germany. (more…)

I have to assume that my Euro-savvy readers will be quite aware of the growing financial crisis involving the euro and the so-called “PIIGS” countries that are in fiscal trouble (“Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain,” though these days Italy is usually left out). Greece is at the center of attention now, and the main issue when it comes to its fiscal problems – combined with its government’s dishonesty in reporting these in the past – seems to be the conflict between the emotional impulses to bail it out from EU or European Central Bank funds or punish its sins instead by simply letting the country suffer. The EU summit in Brussels on Thursday (11 February) is shaping up to be decisive in deciding which way things will go – assuming that the assembled EU heads of government discuss the problem in the first place, as I understand that that is not really on their formal agenda!

The dominant EU country within the governing structures of the EU and the European Central Bank is of course Germany, which is also the main economy in an opposite fiscal situation to that of the PIIGS states and so theoretically able financially to provide much of the aid that Greece needs. That is why it has been interesting to read coverage of this problem in Die Welt, the mainstream German paper not quite as authoritative as Die Zeit (and the latter is more of a pure opinion-publication anyway), but still with a respected reputation as a daily that is distributed nationwide. (more…)

As of a couple months ago there has been a new German government in power – CDU/CSU in coalition with the liberal-economic FDP, rather than in a “grand coalition” with the SPD socialist party. Those circumstances happened to give rise to a new running concern (or running gag – take your choice) about the very tenuous relationship some of Germany’s top politicians have with the English language. Chancellor Angela Merkel herself by all accounts acquits herself quite well in English – and in Russian, too, they say, but then again she was an academic researcher before she got into politics (and she delivered a small part of her address before a joint session of the US Congress last year in English). On the other hand, her top partner in the new coalition, namely Guido Westerwelle who heads the FDP, tried in a half-hearted way to speak some English in his first appearances after the new government was formed, only to become widely mocked for how bad that was going and to finally decide “the hell with it!” (or rather, I would imagine, something like Schluß damit!) and just going with German, to include insisting that questions asked of him during press conferences be phrased only in German. (I’m sorry to have to remind you here, if you didn’t know it already, that Westerwelle’s formal position in the new German government is as Foreign Minister!)

Now it’s time for a new European Commission, which will be sworn in next week and in which the German representative naturally always gets an important portfolio. This time that is to be Günther Oettinger, President of the state of Baden-Württemberg and now Commissioner-designate of the EU’s Energy Directorate (not so important in the past, as it was held by a Lithuanian for the last five years; but clearly to be of major importance henceforth). And yes, Oettinger has a problem with English, a big problem. (But what can you really expect from someone with, in effect, two umlauts in his name, including the “Oe”?) Apparently he is only barely able to pronounce in public the English words on a paper before him that his staff have written for him to say. (more…)

By now you’ve heard about the election results from last Sunday in Germany: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU gained seats while her “Grand Coalition” partner the SPD lost them, but the significant new development was that the right-wing, business-friendly party the FDP itself also gained enough seats in the Bundestag to make possible a rupture of that “Grand Coalition” in favor of a right-of-center CDU/CSU-FDP coalition government. Traditionally the head of the junior party in a German governing coalition is given the Foreign Minister’s portfolio; in this case that is FDP head Guido Westerwelle.

We’ve been hearing quite a lot about Westerwelle in the press – and that’s even before he and Merkel have formally entered into negotiations as to how they will form their coalition government, which just goes to show what a foregone and “traditional” conclusion it is that he will become Foreign Minister. He’s a J.D. (Juris Doctor, i.e. “doctor of laws” or lawyer), and he’s openly gay. Remarkably, the German electorate seems not particularly bothered by either fact.

Already a minor flap has arisen in his connection, though. You can see it on video here: at his first post-election press conference he refused to take a question in English which a correspondent from the BBC wished to pose to him. So it’s apparent that he doesn’t feel very comfortable with his English. You might find that a rather unfortunate quality in a foreign minister – and you would likely be right. But Mariam Lau of Die Welt believes it reveals something rather deeper: The smallness-of-spirit of Foreign Minister Westerwelle. (more…)

As we’ve mentioned before in this space, but in other contexts, there is a German general election due on Sunday, 27 September. To mention yet another context: that happens to be the middle-Sunday of the two weeks of Oktoberfest, so perhaps we can expect reduced electoral turnout among Munich polling-places and/or increased incidents of voting-while-drunk.

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. (more…)

So now Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has made his long-awaited speech, on Friday, making it clear that any further street demonstrations would draw a ruthless crackdown by the security forces. And those further demonstrations, which nonetheless took place over the weekend, have duly resulted in pitched street-battles, with many among the protestors (and innocent by-standers) killed and wounded. What happens next?

Andreas Relster, writer for the Danish opinion newspaper Information, certainly has no idea. Still, at least he has that forum in which to raise the subject, and can resort to a strategy of canvassing the opinions of every Iran-expert out there whom he can get to respond to his inquiries. This is essentially the method behind his current piece, Iranian mirage. (more…)

I hate to be a “downer” here at EuroSavant, but nonetheless feel an obligation (as explained below) to bring up recent alarming pronouncements about Germany’s immediate future made by a prominent economics professor there, Dr. Max Otte (full last name: “Otte van Ullstein”) of the University of Worms. The main coverage I found in Die Welt (Crash-guru demands vacation-ban for Germans, no by-line), although that article references and orients itself around a brief interview Prof. Otte recently gave to Berliner Kurier (The crash-professor prophesies: the crisis will hit us this hard), a Berlin-based tabloid. (more…)

That’s at least according to “Devil’s Advocate” (Advocaat van de Duivel), a television program on the Dutch state network Nederland 2, on which every week “lawyer Gerard Spong defends a prominent personality about whom public opinion has an outspoken position,” according to its description on Nederland 2. We’re informed of this vital and earth-shaking development, not from a Dutch newspaper, but from journalists across the border writing for the German daily Die Welt (TV court declares Osaba bin Laden innocent; I tried but could not find any report on this in the on-line Dutch press).

Yes, this program is a sort of “people’s court” in which Spong – in his day-job a prominent Amsterdam defense attorney who charges up to €450 an hour – defends the notorious before a “citizen’s jury” and a larger studio audience, who are each then polled to see what effect his arguments have had on them. (Check it out: you can watch the entire latest program from this webpage, just click on the bekijk uitzending link, but of course it’s in Dutch with no sub-titles.) And in this particular episode that “citizen’s jury” ruled as “unproven” both the propositions that Bin Laden was the planner/director of the September 11 attacks and even that he was the founder/leader of al-Qaeda. Instead, both the jury and the studio audience ruled that those attacks on New York and Washington were most likely “a fiction propounded by Western politicians.” Still, Spong did try to push things a bit too far – maybe that’s just the professional instinct of any good defense lawyer – by also advancing the proposition that Bin Laden was a mere “freedom-fighter at war against the West”; the jury concluded instead that he is indeed “a terrorist who misuses Islam for personal ambitions to power.”

That Die Welt article holds tightly to the prescribed journalistic objectivity, simply passing on to readers the fact that this TV program occurred and the details as to what the “citizen’s jury” decided, without any additional editorial comment. In that same vox populi, vox dei spirit, it also displays in a prominent spot at its head a simple Yes/No on-line poll question: “Is al-Qaeda still a danger for the West?”

. . . and now back to our regularly-scheduled coverage of depressing news from the current economic crisis. The latest development is the Congressional Budget Office’s report, released yesterday, maintaining that the US Government actually faces budget deficits and total indebtedness amounting to even higher unbelievably-large numbers than the unbelievably-large numbers presented under President Obama’s budget proposals.

The respected German daily Die Welt promptly picked up on this news to come out with its own article: Congress expects highest deficit of all time. What we should look at first here is the German word for “deficit” itself, used in that headline: Fehlbetrag, derived from the verb fehlen, “to err, sin, blunder” – so a “blunder-amount,” if you will. That pretty much sets the tone, right there; even before the reader’s eye gets to the inserted photo of an earnest President Obama – i.e. while it is still reading the lede – it gets assaulted not only by enormous numbers ($1.8 trillion/€1.3 trillion deficit for 2009, $9.3 trillion debt by 2019) but also by the accompanying loaded descriptions (“record total,” “without precedent,” “a debt-mountain”). Then the remainder of the relatively short piece fills in the remaining horrific details, like that such deficits would amount to over 4% of US GDP – “a value that experts term untenable.” US Budget Director Peter Orszag is quoted as conceding that a 5% deficit (getting close!) would truly be unbearable, even as he also maintains that the CBO’s estimates are unduly more pessimistic than the administration’s proposals. (more…)

Here’s another entry in the series we seem to have fallen into lately of “Countries Tooting Their Own Horns.” We already have learned, from the Danish, that the Danish economy can be a “supermodel” for the rest of the world, and (from the Belgians) that Belgium is the most-globalized country. Now, as a current article in Die Welt puts it, Germany is the most-beloved state in the world!

Ah yes, we know – those cuddly Germans! But wait: looking beyond the headline, what this is really all about is a worldwide poll, undertaken yearly for the BBC World Service by the firm GlobeScan, asking respondents to react to a list of fifteen prominent countries by stating whether, in each case, they feel that country has a positive or a negative influence on world affairs. This year, for the first time, Germany was tops, with 61% positive and only 15% negative. Canada was second (57/14), the UK was third (58/19).

(OK, the UK was third even with a slightly-higher positive rating than Canada; obviously GlobeScan uses some ranking formula that combines the two inputs. The good thing about this poll is that the sample was a rather-large 13,575 people, from among 21 countries. The bad thing is that I can’t find any mention of it on the BBC World Service website or any affiliated BBC webpages.)

And the losers? In tenth place was China, at 39/40 – yes, despite those marvelous Summer Olympics. In eleventh place came the USA, with 43% evaluating its influence on world affairs as negative (40% positive). Keep in mind that this poll was conducted after Barack Obama was elected president last November 4 – but at least that negative rating for the Americans is down from the 48% that it was in last year’s poll. Then Russia at twelfth place (30/42). Israel is at fourteenth place (21/51), but at least the Jewish state beats out Pakistan (17/53).

Presidential or Parliamentary? The question of which system makes for a more effective and truly representative government has engaged political scientists for many years, but make no mistake: it also has some serious real-world consequences. Right now, with the Bush administration headed towards the history books stained by torture, illegal wiretapping, Katrina, Iraq, financial collapse, a corrupt Dept. of Justice, etc., etc., the presidential model is most assuredly under some disfavor. (Oh, and the presidential system also results in excruciatingly-long lame-duck periods waiting for the new chief executive to take power that are really inconsistent with the speed of events in the modern day. See this recent New York Times article for a solution to that that was contemplated in the past, but which Bush has nowhere near the intelligence nor love-of-country to implement now.) But a recent article in the authoritative German daily Die Welt by Jan Dams (Financial crisis: Glos provokes Merkel and Steinbrück) reminds us of many of the defects of the parliamentary system, especially during economically perilous times. (more…)

It’s a common trait of the scientific community for researchers to commune to pool their brains while investigating perplexing phenomena that no one quite yet has been able to get a handle on understanding. AIDS. The possibility of extra-terrestrial life. And, yes, the mystery that is Michael Jackson: Josef Engels brings us word today in Die Welt of the conference that took place over this past weekend in New Haven, CT, whose subject was none other than the King of Pop. (He is a Person.) (more…)

The bloodshed that finally ended the two-day stand-off at Middle School #1 in Beslan, North Ossetia was reportedly started by accident: security forces’ reaction to shots being fired at hostages trying to escape and/or some explosives set by the terrorists going off accidentally. It should go without saying that that bloody conclusion to the crisis, which has claimed 335 lives and counting, was not supposed to happen. After all, the Russian authorities had made it plain that the safety of the hundreds of hostages being held captive on the school grounds had “absolute priority.”

Don’t believe it. Even if things came to the particular conclusion they did unintentionally – and even in view of the 25 people the authorities had persuaded the attackers to release unharmed the day before – a violent end to the drama was ultimately inevitable. Journalist Manfred Quiring makes this point well in his recent analysis for Die Welt (“Let It Cost What It Will). (more…)

John Kerry delivered his acceptance speech last Thursday night to bring the Democratic National Convention to its culmination, and the German press was certainly paying attention. But this should have been no surprise to readers of the Economist (subscription required), which this week reminds us how Germans massively dislike George W. Bush, and so are presumably very interested in the personality and prospects of the alternative candidate who can send him packing to Crawford, Texas. (That Economist article, unfortunately, also dwells on Germans’ current dislike for the US generally – but, like the country or not, they surely cannot be under the delusion that the result of November’s presidential election has no impact on them.)

Unfortunately, most of the articles I surveyed in the German press covering Kerry’s acceptance speech were happy to limit themselves to a mere “translation function,” i.e. explaining to their readers what Kerry said. Most disappointing was such a “translator” article in Die Zeit (Kerry Wants to Restore the USA’s Prestige), from which we ordinarily can expect better – and that article itself was borrowed from the German business newspaper Handelsblatt. EuroSavant readers presumably had plenty of opportunity to read in English what Kerry said, if they didn’t already see the speech on TV live, so such articles are not so useful.

Handelsblatt wisely chose to keep its higher value-added materials for itself, though, as we can see from its editorial on Kerry’s speech (Bridge-Builder Kerry) from correspondent Michael Backfisch. (more…)

Princeton professor emeritus Bernard Lewis is awful smart about the Middle East, having made that the specialty of his entire scholarly life. How smart? Smart enough to already have a book out like What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East when the terrorists struck on September 11, 2001, and so made it a best-seller among those trying to fathom just what it is about that part of the world that would make human beings commit such acts.

Wolfgang G. Schwanitz of the German newspaper Die Welt popped by Princeton recently for a visit, and the resulting interview transcript appears today on the Die Welt website. The point Lewis makes in the conversation that Schwanitz picks out to be his teaser is interesting enough (the interview’s title is “Europe Will Be Islamic By the End of the Century”), although he advances it at the interview’s very end, almost as a throw-away, telling Schwanitz that demographic trends clearly indicate that Europe can look forward to becoming nothing more than an extension of Arab North Africa (the Maghreb) in a few decades’ time, and not any sort of world-counterweight to America.

But Lewis makes a number of other interesting points as well in the interview. (more…)

Mordechai Vanunu was the Israeli “atomic spy,” the nuclear technician who in 1986 revealed secret information about Israel’s covert weapons program at the nuclear reactor at Dimona, in the Negev desert of southern Israel, in an interview with the London Sunday Times. For his troubles he was lured to Rome later that year and kidnapped there by Mossad agents, who brought him back to Israel and so to Israeli legal jurisdiction. In a secret trial, he was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for treason, which he finished serving last April.

Out of jail, it seems Vanunu still just can’t hold his tongue. (This profile in the Guardian mentions that, among other restrictions, he is obliged not to talk to the foreign press; at the same time, he is appealing to Israel’s supreme court for permission to leave the country again. Yet he recently gave an interview to the London-based Arab newspaper Al Hayat.) This strangely-stubborn behavior is probably something the rest of the world should be grateful for, at least for those who would prefer to be a little better aware of Israeli nuclear activities than the Israeli government would prefer, and the German newspaper Die Welt has picked up on his latest (Atom Expert Warns of a “Second Chernobyl” in Israel). (more…)